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, and OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever—Dwarkesh Patel provides the first comprehensive and contemporary portrait of the technology that is transforming our world. The Scaling Era offers readers unprecedented insight into a transformative moment in the AI’s development—and a vision of what comes next.