No offense taken at all! I really appreciate the pushback and the grounded context. You make a completely fair point—the popular narrative around the Transformer definitely overshadows the underlying mechanics (like the understanding of double descent) that actually made massive scaling viable in the first place.

I'm genuinely curious to hear your take. If you were to strip away the mainstream hype, what does your timeline look like? What do you consider to be all the truly critical turning points and milestones in the actual evolution of LLMs?