Show HN: AI Timeline – 171 LLMs from Transformer (2017) to GPT-5.3 (2026)
20 points
5 hours ago
| 9 comments
| llm-timeline.com
| HN
Interactive timeline of every major Large Language Model. Filterable by open/closed source, searchable, 54 organizations tracked.
wobblywobbegong
7 minutes ago
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Calling this "The complete history of AI" seems wrong. LLM's are not all AI there is, and it has existed for way longer than people realize.
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nubg
6 minutes ago
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Most of "AI" before ChatGPT was just researchers wasting public grant money, eg BLOOM.
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adt
21 minutes ago
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NitpickLawyer
4 hours ago
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Misses a few interesting early models: GPT-J (by Eleuther, using gpt2 arch) was the first-ish model runnable on consumer hardware. I actually had a thing running for a while in prod with real users on this. And GPT-NeoX was their attempt to scale to gpt3 levels. It was 20b and was maybe the first glimpse that local models might someday be usable (although local at the time was questionable, quantisation wasn't as widely used, etc).
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pu_pe
4 hours ago
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GPT-J was the one that made me really interested in LLMs, as I could run it on a 3090.

Some details on the timeline are not quite precise, and would benefit from linking to a source so that everyone can verify it. For example, HyperClOVA is listed as 204B parameters, but it seems it used 560B parameters (https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.274/).

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ai_bot
4 hours ago
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Great idea! Thanks
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ai_bot
4 hours ago
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Great catches — just added GPT-Neo (2.7B, Mar 2021), GPT-J (6B, Jun 2021), and GPT-NeoX (20B, Apr 2022). Thanks!
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Maro
1 hour ago
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This would be interesting if each of them had a high-level picture of the NN, "to scale", perhaps color coding the components somehow. OnMouseScroll it would scroll through the models, and you could see the networks become deeper, wider, colors change, almost animated. That'd be cool.
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ai_bot
1 hour ago
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Thanks! Great idea
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hmokiguess
1 hour ago
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Would be nice to see some charts and perhaps an average of the cycles with a prediction of the next one based on it
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ai_bot
1 hour ago
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Thanks! I'll add some charts
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jvillasante
1 hour ago
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Why is it hard in the times where AI itself can do it to add a light mode to those blacks websites!? There are people that just can't read dark mode!
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Lerc
45 minutes ago
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Visual presentation has been a weak point of AI generation for me. There isn't a lot of support for them seeing how a potential presentation might appear to a human.

Models that take visual input seem more focused on identifying what is in the image compared to what a human might perceive is in an image, and most interfaces lack any form of automated feedback mechanism for them to look at what it has made.

In short, I have made some fun things with AI but I still end up doing CSS by hand.

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ai_bot
1 hour ago
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Thank you! Sorry for the inconvenience. I'll add it a bit later
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YetAnotherNick
50 minutes ago
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It misses almost every milestones, and lists Llama 3.1 as milestone. T5 was much bigger milestone than almost everything in the list.
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ai_bot
25 minutes ago
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Fair point on T5 — just marked it as a milestone. On Llama 3.1: it's there as a milestone because it was the first open model to match GPT-4 at 405B, which felt like a genuine inflection point. Happy to debate the milestone criteria though — what would you add?
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embedding-shape
42 minutes ago
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> T5 was much bigger milestone than almost everything in the list.

It's in the timeline though? Or are you saying that one should somehow be highlighted, even though none of the other ones are? Seems it's just chronological order, with no one being more or less visible than others, as far as I can see.

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YetAnotherNick
30 minutes ago
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Some are highlighted and listed as milestones.
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varispeed
1 hour ago
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The models used for apps like Codex, are they designed to mimic human behaviour - as in they deliberately create errors in code that then you have to spend time debugging and fixing or it is natural flaw and that humans also do it is a coincidence?

This keeps bothering me, why they need several iterations to arrive at correct solution instead of doing it first time. The prompts like "repeat solving it until it is correct" don't help.

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embedding-shape
41 minutes ago
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> as in they deliberately create errors in code that then you have to spend time debugging and fixing

No, all the models are designed to be "helpful", but different companies see that as different things.

If you're seeing the model deliberately creating errors so you have something to fix, then that sounds like something is fundamentally wrong in your prompt.

Besides that, I'm guessing "repeat solving it until it is correct" is a concise version of your actual prompt, or is that verbatim what you prompt the model? If so, you need to give it more details to actually be able to execute something like that.

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EpicIvo
50 minutes ago
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Great site! I noticed a minor visual glitch where the tooltips seem to be rendering below their container on the z-axis, possibly getting clipped or hidden.
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ai_bot
41 minutes ago
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Thanks for the feedback! I'll fix it asap.
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