#language models

Tagged language models · show all articles

The long interior of a ropewalk seen down its length, with a wheeled traveller cart caught part-way along the walk and yarn still forming behind it

From n-Grams to Reasoning Models: A Technical History of the Language Model

The line from Shannon's letter counts to trained deliberation is usually told as one long scaling curve. It was not. It was a sequence of specific bottlenecks, each named, each broken by a different idea.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 8, 2026 · 16 min read

Browse by Category

Surprise me →

All AI Hardware & Semiconductors 100 AI Agents & Systems 33 Foundation Models 27 Model Evaluation 15 AI Industry 9 Edge AI & Electronics 7 AI Safety 7 AI Research 7 Open Models 6 AI Infrastructure 5 Industry Analysis 2 Datacenters & Infrastructure 2 Writing & Information 1 Structural Biology 1 Small & Edge Models 1 Semiconductor Markets 1 Security & Technology 1 Security 1 Scientific Revolution 1 Robotics & Embodied AI 1 Quantum Information 1 Planetary Science 1 Physics 1 Particle Physics 1 Origins & Astrobiology 1 Open-Weight Models 1 Neuroscience 1 Metrology 1 Mathematics & Computation 1 Materials Science 1 Labour & Technology 1 Interpretability 1 Institutions & State Capacity 1 Institutions & Economy 1 Inference Economics 1 Industrial Revolutions 1 Humanity & Technology 1 History of Technology 1 History of Computing 1 Governance & Policy 1 Evolution & Ecology 1 Ethics of Technology 1 Energy & Civilization 1 Earth & Climate 1 Demography & Urbanization 1 Data & Training 1 Cumulative Culture 1 Cosmology 1 Condensed Matter 1 Chemistry & Catalysis 1 Alignment & Safety 1 Agriculture & Cities 1 Agent Evaluation 1 AI Security 1 AI & The Web 1