Cover of The Model Wars

Books · Kindle edition · 2026

The Model Wars

From the Transformer to the Age of Agents — A Chronicle of How AI Rewrote the World, 2017–2026

Cat Zhang & Yu Zhang · First edition

Coming to KindleRead the preface
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 not a textbook on algorithms. It asks the questions worth chasing instead: 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 quant fund in Hangzhou spent a reported $5.57 million on one training run and moved Wall Street.

Inside

Five eras

  • I · Undercurrents2017–2020
  • II · Thunder2021–2022
  • III · Warring States2023–2024
  • 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 · Thunder (2021–2022)

  1. 5 · The Bridle — InstructGPT and Forty People Grading Homework
  2. 6 · The Secret Formula, Posted Online — Stable Diffusion Fires the First Shot
  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 · Warring States (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 Coup at OpenAI
  5. 13 · The War of a Hundred Models — 300 Models and 78,000 Companies
  6. 14 · The Chasers — Gemini, Claude, and Three Ways to Survive

Part IV · New Order (2025)

  1. 15 · The Catfish — DeepSeek and the $5.57 Million Model
  2. 16 · Open Source Wins — 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-Day War — 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 & Yu Zhang

Cat Zhang and Yu Zhang write about artificial intelligence and its impact on the world.

About Pangora Labs

Corrections

Found an error?

The book covers events through mid-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.