The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025
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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visualizations, explanations of technical points made by guests, classic essays on the theme from other writers, and unpublished interviews with Open Philanthropy research analyst Ajeya Cotra and Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan.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 readers unprecedented insight into a transformative moment in the development of AI—and a vision of what comes next.
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Publisher : Stripe Press
Publication date : October 8, 2025
Language : English
Print length : 248 pages
ISBN-10 : 1953953557
ISBN-13 : 978-1953953551
Item Weight : 1.22 pounds
Dimensions : 6.25 x 2 x 9.25 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #19,972 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #2 in Natural Language Processing (Books) #22 in Computers & Technology Industry #22 in Artificial Intelligence & Semantics
Customer Reviews: 4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars (129) var dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction; P.when(‘A’, ‘ready’).execute(function(A) { if (dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction !== true) { dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction = true; A.declarative( ‘acrLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault”: true }, function (event) { if (window.ue) { ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } } ); } }); P.when(‘A’, ‘cf’).execute(function(A) { A.declarative(‘acrStarsLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault” : true }, function(event){ if(window.ue) { ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } }); });
12 reviews for The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025
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Original price was: $35.00.$31.64Current price is: $31.64.
Geff –
Cut through the AI NOISE. Hear from the Pioneers and Key Players.
It felt GOOD to read the “first-hand” accounts of people that actually KNOW what they are doing in this field; the pioneers. You can tell they are extremely intelligent, excited, worried, cautious, and reckless all at the same time. It is an interesting mixture. Since this field has “gotten big”, there is so much NOISE around. Everyone wants a slice of the pie, everyone wants to get involved, everyone wants THEIR voice to be heard. It was nice to sit quietly and just LISTEN to the reality from first-hand-accounts, from experience.Very well presented. Thoughtfully laid out. This book brought CLARITY. It will be staying on my shelf.
Telemed911 –
A standout among recent books about artificial intelligence
A great book, mostly focusing on large language models. It stands out amidst the flotsam and jetsam of recent populist books on artificial intelligence. Odd citation and footnote style, but there is a great deal of good information in this book, although sadly no applied mathematics.
Rigveda –
Love it
Love the book
Mitch Haile –
One of the best contemporary AI books right now
Fantastic book; everyone doing AI development at any level of sophistication will benefit from reading this book. I skimmed around in it on a few topics of key interest for me, and I have already gotten so much out of it.I’ve only had it for a few days but it’s clearly a valuable book.
Nathan Clevenger –
The most important book to read this year (in 2025)
I just finished `The Scaling Era` by Dwarkesh Patel that was released yesterday, and I believe this book is going to become one of the most important books in AI history.While technical, this book is not about technology. It is about the tidal wave that is heading towards society, culture, and humanity. There are very few people who truly understand the impact of what is coming, and I hope this book can help sound the alarm.I read 50-100 books a year, and this is the best book I have read in a long time. I am strongly recommending it to everyone I know – my team, my friends, my family – whether you are “into” AI or not.
ATN –
a very interesting but incomplete intro to AI
I truly enjoyed The Scaling Era. It is one of the most approachable books to AI I have come across while providing an overall sense of progress and development. It feels more like a series of vignettes and insights of the time reviewed that starts to give you a skeleton of how LLMs work and where they are going. However due to the scale and scope of information in this space and the appropriate lack of technical details you get a sense of how much more there is to learn and discover. Hopefully this books gives a sense of where to to next.
Amazon Customer –
This could have been an email or a blog post
The book is extremely difficult to follow. A good half of the interviewed people have no idea and are just making things up. This is a Silicon Valley tv show in a book format, except it is not funny.I can’t believe Stripe agreed to publish this. The hardcover quality is superb as always hence 2 stars.Better read Prince’s Understanding Deep Learning.
JD –
Great book
Dwarkesh is posing great questions to the very few people in the industry that are actually qualified to answer.Learnt a lot from this book, despite following this area closely already.
Simon –
ok
Axel –
good book
volker –
Great Book: both the ideas, thoughts and the quality of the paper/binding – a true delight dor AI nerds and book worms.
Anon –
IMHO, this is an important compendium of the very important changes that have transformed the AI-KI area between 2018 and 2024. The printed book includes an overview of the important AI concepts. It also includes an extensively referenced bibliography, where readers can dig more deeply. For those who don’t follow blogs and such, this printed summary gives (up until the cutoff date of November 2024, very openly referrred and noticed therefore not including RAG and the rise of inference-only engines such as PRC DeepSeek) for me (Nerd) an important hint about how drastically the world of AI has changed recently.