The Scaling Era, by the brilliant @dwarkesh_sp with @g_leech_, and edited by @rebeccahiscott, is out today: Since we announced this book, the question we’ve gotten most is ‘why now?’

My answer: we’re in the middle of a pretty unusual moment. So far, the amount of money being poured by companies working towards AGI rivals or exceeds previous technological races: electrification, the railroads, semiconductors, the dotcom boom (for more on that, see our last book, Boom). But the people doing the work aren't going to stop and write books about it.

Luckily for us, Dwarkesh talked to them anyway! Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Mark Zuckerberg, and others sat down with him to explain the technical details of their models, what improvements look like, and where they think this is headed.

The Scaling Era stitches together those conversations: their points of agreement and disagreement, and the economic and social ramifications they're grappling with as they build.

Luckily for us, Dwarkesh talked to them anyway! Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Mark Zuckerberg, and others sat down with him to explain how the models work, what improvements look like, and where they think this is headed.

The Scaling Era stitches together those conversations: the technical details, the points of agreement and disagreement, and the economic and social ramifications they're grappling with as they build.

Contemporary snapshots of significant work in progress are underrated, and we hope this one eventually becomes a valuable historical artifact. This technology might double GDP. It might be existentially dangerous. Or both! We wanted to capture what the people building it believe right now, before we know how it turns out. The Scaling Era is our best effort at stenography of this moment—before AGI.