The Scaling Era

A Stripe Press volume built from Patel’s podcast interviews, edited by Gavin Leech into an oral history of the years when scaling laws became the organising bet of the field. The speakers are the people who made the bet — among them Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Mark Zuckerberg — and the excerpts are arranged by theme rather than by episode: how the models actually work, what scaling buys and where it might stop, the risk of misalignment, the compute and capital required, and what superintelligence would do to growth and to politics. It is a record of an argument in progress rather than a verdict on it.

Why it’s on the list: The primary-source record of how the people running the labs were reasoning while the scaling bet was still open — the kind of document that is only assembled while the participants still disagree.

Where I saw it: @tylercosgrove’s October 15, 2025 list of 25 books he offered to send to Jared Kushner.

Connections

• Dwarkesh Patel — the interviewer, and the source of the material.
• Stripe Press — the publisher.
• AGI — the thing the book’s subjects are arguing about whether scaling reaches.
• AI — the field the oral history covers.
• Dario Amodei — one of the interviewees.