Fireship · 2026-06-17 · notable
Fireship: 'I read every major CS paper of the last 100 years'
Fireship races through ten foundational computer-science papers, half of them on the path that led to today's LLMs: Rosenblatt's perceptron (1958), Minsky and Papert's perceptron critique (1969), the backprop paper (1986), AlexNet (2012), 'Attention Is All You Need' (2017), and Brown's GPT-3 paper (2020).
Fireship's whirlwind tour through 100 years of computer-science papers, with the modern AI canon as the spine.
What is it?
Fireship's video walks through ten papers Fireship treats as the load-bearing pillars of modern computing. The AI-relevant half covers Rosenblatt's perceptron (1958), Minsky and Papert's Perceptrons book (1969) that froze neural-net research for a decade, the Rumelhart-Hinton-Williams backpropagation paper (1986), AlexNet (Krizhevsky-Sutskever-Hinton, 2012), 'Attention Is All You Need' (Vaswani et al., 2017), and Tom Brown's GPT-3 paper (2020).
How does it work?
Standard Fireship format — fast cuts, one-line summaries of each paper, on-screen citations to the originals. Fireship draws a line from the perceptron through the AI winter, the backprop revival, the ImageNet moment, the Transformer, and the GPT-3 scale jump that produced today's LLMs.
Why does it matter?
Fireship's audience is millions of working developers. A clean origin story for the Transformer-era LLM, told in nine minutes, shapes how a lot of engineers understand WHY their tools work the way they do — useful context whenever the next frontier release lands.
Who is it for?
developers wanting a quick AI-history primer
Try it
Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=ML3q7Ok4hJg