# On the Origin of LLMs: An Evolutionary Tree and Graph for 15,821 Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09793 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09793/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 0 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Two Birds with One Stone: Multi-Task Detection and Attribution of LLM-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14190/) (2025)
- [Dark LLMs: The Growing Threat of Unaligned AI Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10066/) (2025)
- [Prompts and Prayers: the Rise of GPTheology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10019/) (2026)
- [ArtifactLinker: Linking Scientific Artifacts for Automatic State-of-the-Art Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16902/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Since late 2022, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become very prominent with LLMs like ChatGPT and Bard receiving millions of users. Hundreds of new LLMs are announced each week, many of which are deposited to Hugging Face, a repository of machine learning models and datasets. To date, nearly 16,000 Text Generation models have been uploaded to the site. Given the huge influx of LLMs, it is of interest to know which LLM backbones, settings, training methods, and families are popular or trending. However, there is no comprehensive index of LLMs available. We take advantage of the relatively systematic nomenclature of Hugging Face LLMs to perform hierarchical clustering and identify communities amongst LLMs using n-grams and term frequency-inverse document frequency. Our methods successfully identify families of LLMs and accurately cluster LLMs into meaningful subgroups. We present a public web application to navigate and explore Constellation, our atlas of 15,821 LLMs. Constellation rapidly generates a variety of visualizations, namely dendrograms, graphs, word clouds, and scatter plots. Constellation is available at the following link: https://constellation.sites.stanford.edu/.