Asionometry has a great video on it: https://youtu.be/sV7C6Ezl35A

The Levy book Hackers has a ehole third of the book about it.

Haven’t got time to watch that but that book seems quite old. Are you sure it talks about LLMs?

They weren't called LLMs, but they had neural networks and hardware optimizations for AI and huge teams of people tirelessly labeling stuff to make it look smarter than it is :)

There is some surprise factor at the GPT-3 -> gpt-4-1106 jump for people who know the history of AI generally and who were around a lab during the ImageNet days, but not as much as everyone is acting like.

The last two years are a notable but by no means unprecedented rush towards the next wall. There's even a term for it: AI Summer is short and AI winter is long and its about as predictable as the seasons in Game of Thrones / ASOIAF.