An Oral History of the Scaling Era

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

How did we build large language models? Is scaling them up all we need to create general intelligence? How do they think, if they think? Will we be able to make them share our goals-and what happens if we can't?

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 economic, philosophical, and safety considerations of creating artificial general intelligence. 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 170 definitions and 17 visualizations, explanations of technical points made by guests, classic essays on the theme from other writers, and an unpublished interview with Open Philanthropy research analyst Ajeya Cotra.

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