The Scaling Era

An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025

Dwarkesh Patel, Gavin Leech

$59.99

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Stripe Press
08 October 2025

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 visualisations, explanations of technical points made by guests, classic essays on the theme from other writers, and unpublished interviews with Open Philanthropy research analyst Ajeya Cotra and Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan.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.

By: Dwarkesh Patel
Edited by: Gavin Leech
Imprint: Stripe Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 159mm,
ISBN: 9781953953551
ISBN 10: 1953953557
Pages: 248
Publication Date: 08 October 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Preface Profiles Chapter 1: Scaling Chapter 2: Evals Chapter 3: Internals Chapter 4: Alignment Chapter 5: Inputs Chapter 6: Impact Chapter 7: Explosion Chapter 8: Timelines Conclusion Appendix: Essays Glossary Bibliography Acknowledgments About the Authors

Dwarkesh Patel is the host of Dwarkesh Podcast, where he produces deeply researched interviews with both obscure intellectuals and the most influential figures of our time.

Reviews for The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025

“Dwarkesh has done a whole series of excellent video interviews with top AI researchers and engineers, and this book is a great distillation of those conversations to help people understand modern AI models, how they are built, where they are headed, and why they are important.” —Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research “There’s only one test relevant for an artifact about AI: Would you learn more from reading it than you would from using a newly released LLM for the equivalent amount of time? The Scaling Era handily passes.” —Patrick McKenzie, author of Bits About Money and host of Complex Systems “Dwarkesh’s interviews are full of quotes that will be in history books.” —Byrne Hobart, investor, consultant, and author of The Diff and Boom