LIMITLESS - Dwarkesh Patel: The Scaling Era of AI is Here
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Hey, guys. We have a special episode today. We have Dorkesh Patel on the podcast. Now Dorkesh is probably one of my favorite podcasters. He is most in my podcast rotation list. And specifically, he's great on AI topics, which is the subject of today's episode. This is about the scaling era of AI. The scaling era is something new in AI, new for humanity. It's something we've never seen before. And Dworkesh is very much on the frontier of this movement. So we get through the full history and where we've come today, and I loved every minute of this conversation. Now you can usually catch episodes
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Patel, we are big fans. It's an honor to have you. Thank
you so much for having me on. Okay.
So, you have a book out. It's called The Scaling Era, an Oral History of AI from 2019 to 2025. These are some key dates here. This is really a story of how AI, emerged. And, it seemed to have exploded on people's radar over the past five years. And everyone in the world, it feels like, is trying to figure out what just happened and what is about to happen. And I feel like for this story, we should start at the beginning as your book does. What is the scaling era of AI? And when abouts did it start? What were the, like, the key milestones? So
I I think the undertold story about everybody's, of course, been hearing more and more about AI. The undertold story is that the big contributor to these AI models getting better over time has been the fact that we are throwing exponentially more compute into trading frontier systems every year. So by some estimates, we we spend four x every single year over the last decade trading the frontier system than the one before it. And that just means that we're spending hundreds of thousands of times more compute than the systems of the early twenty tens. Of course, we've also had algorithmic breakt
what what do you people what do you feel like people should know about this? Like, what like, what is the scaling era? There have been other eras maybe of AI or compute, but what's special about the scaling era?
People started noticing well, first of all, in 2012, there's this Ilyas Seskever and others started using neural networks in order to categorize images. And just noticing that instead of doing something hand coded, you can get a lot of juice out of just neural networks, black boxes. You just train them to identify what thing is like what. And then people started playing around these neural networks more, using them for different kinds of applications. And then the question became, we're noticing that these models get better if you throw more data at them and you throw more compute at them. How
mean, that's kind of a key insight of your book that, like, we're in the middle of the scaling era. I guess we're, like, you know, six years in or so, and we're we're not quite sure. It's, like, like, the protagonist in the middle of the story. Like, we don't know exactly which way things are gonna go. But I want you to maybe, Dworkesh, help folks,
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