How language models came to be

How language models came to be

A route through 78 years of research, from a 1948 paper about information to the models of 2026.

Fourteen stops along ten research threads. Every connection drawn here comes from a source. Scroll to travel: at each stop a diagram changes as the story moves, and fourteen experiments let you run the main ideas yourself.

Each coloured line is a research thread. It starts in the year of its first milestone in this history and runs to the present, where the threads meet in today's frontier models. The lines group work by theme; they do not claim cause and effect. Years before 2012 are compressed, at the break in the axis.

The whole system

Every station from the story on one map, in date order. The chapters after ChatGPT overlap in time; here you can watch threads that developed in parallel run side by side. Select any station to open its study card.

Trace a lineage

Pick a model and follow its documented influences back through time. The family tree uses only relationships the sources support, so some familiar links are missing and some are marked as indirect.