Cover of The Model Race

Books · Kindle edition · 2026

The Model Race

From One Paper to the AI That Changed the World

Cat Zhang, HY Wang & XM Pan · First edition

Coming to Kindle
chapters
23
eras
5
span
2017–2026
language
English

Two dates, seven and a half years apart.

On June 12, 2017, eight Google researchers uploaded a paper to arXiv. On January 27, 2025, Nvidia lost $589 billion of market value in a single day. The line that connects those two events is the story this book tells.

This is a history, not a textbook on algorithms. It asks the questions worth chasing: why Google invented the Transformer and let OpenAI turn it into a product; why “open” gets more closed every year and closure keeps producing new openness; how a lab backed by a Hangzhou quant fund reported $5.576 million in rented GPU time for its final training run, and moved Wall Street.

Inside

Five eras

  • I · Undercurrents2017–2020
  • II · Thunderclap2021–2022
  • III · The Contenders2023–2024
  • IV · New Order2025
  • V · Borders2026
Full table of contents

Part I · Undercurrents (2017–2020)

  1. 1 · Attention Is All You Need — The Paper That Changed Everything
  2. 2 · Two Roads — BERT, GPT, and a Very Reasonable Mistake
  3. 3 · The Lock on the Door — GPT-2 and the Art of Not Shipping
  4. 4 · Brute Force — GPT-3 and the Industrialization of Language

Part II · Thunderclap (2021–2022)

  1. 5 · The Bridle — InstructGPT and Forty People Grading Homework
  2. 6 · The Secret Formula, Posted Online — Stable Diffusion Sets the Pattern
  3. 7 · One Text Box — ChatGPT and a Hundred Million Users in Sixty Days
  4. 8 · The Three-Week Rule — China's Sputnik Moment

Part III · The Contenders (2023–2024)

  1. 9 · No Weigh-In — GPT-4 and the Fight Over AGI
  2. 10 · Year One — AutoGPT and a Very Expensive Education
  3. 11 · Rashomon — The Llama Leak and the Fire It Started
  4. 12 · Seventy-Two Hours — The OpenAI Board Crisis
  5. 13 · The War of a Hundred Models — 300 Models and 878,000 Companies
  6. 14 · The Chasers — Gemini, Claude, and Three Ways to Survive

Part IV · New Order (2025)

  1. 15 · The Catfish — DeepSeek and the $5.576 Million Model
  2. 16 · Open Weights Win — From Model to Toolchain
  3. 17 · From Buzzer to Thought — The Year of the Reasoning Model
  4. 18 · Out of the Room — The Agent Wakes Up
  5. 19 · The App War — How China Broke Out

Part V · Borders (2026)

  1. 20 · The Eight Days — Four Flagships and the Mythos in the Basement
  2. 21 · Listings and Borders — Two Prospectuses and a Kill Switch
  3. 22 · Three Trillion, Half Price — When the Frontier Became a Price Curve
  4. 23 · Epilogue — Nothing Is Settled

Authors

Cat Zhang, HY Wang & XM Pan

Cat Zhang, HY Wang, and XM Pan write about artificial intelligence. The Model Race grew out of nine years of following the field closely: reading the papers as they appeared, using the products as they launched, and keeping notes on what changed and why.

About Pangora Labs

Corrections

Found an error?

The book covers events up to September 20, 2026, and some facts will age. Send anything you spot — a chapter and a sentence is enough.

corrections@pangoralabs.com
Errata · edition 1.0 — none reported yet.