The Scaling Era

An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025

De: Dwarkesh Patel

Narrado por: Dwarkesh Patel

An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people and companies making it happen.

How did we build large language models? How do they think, if they think? What will the world look like if we have billions of AIs that are as smart as humans, or even smarter?

In a series of in-depth interviews with leading AI researchers and company founders—including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—Dwarkesh Patel provides the first comprehensive and contemporary portrait of the technology that is transforming our world.

Drawn from his interviews on the Dwarkesh Podcast, these curated excerpts range from the technical details of how LLMs work to the possibility of an AI takeover or explosive economic growth. Patel’s conversations cut through the noise to explore the topics most compelling to those at the forefront of the field: the power of scaling, the potential for misalignment, the sheer input required for AGI, and the economic and social ramifications of superintelligence. The book is also a standalone introduction to the technology. It includes over 170 definitions and visualizations, explanations of technical points made by guests, classic essays on the theme from other writers, and unpublished interviews with Open Philanthropy research analyst Ajeya Cotra and Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan.

The Scaling Era offers listeners unprecedented insight into a transformative moment in the development of AI—and a vision of what comes next.

©2025 Dwarkesh Patel (P)2025 Stripe Press

it’s a good history, sir

If you have not paid close attention to LLMs, this will catch you up very quickly. One thing that it did for me: Yudkowsky comes across as a complete loon and at least one OOM less intelligent compared to the rest of the experts, unable to directly answer any question asked of him. Sometimes I wondered why the author included him as he stands out so clearly from the others. All I can imagine is the inclusion is for the same reason we have free speech—to shine a light on bad ideas in the free market.