The oral history as a form has traditionally concerned itself with those outside the halls of power. Studs Terkel interviewed steelworkers, Alessandro Portelli documented the lives of coalminers, and the Works Progress Administration collated the narratives of the formerly enslaved. Its premise rests on the notion that official archives have missed something essential about how reality actually unfolded, and that the view from the ground differed meaningfully from the view in the boardroom.
Writer and podcaster Dwarkesh Patel’s The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025 takes the opposite approach. This oral history surveys the people at the very center of power: Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, and another dozen researchers, engineers, and executives involved in the building of frontier artificial intelligence. This is an oral history of the elite, conducted by someone open-minded, if not sympathetic, to their project.
At first glance, this might seem unnecessary, given the hundreds of annual CEO profiles and founder hagiographies. Yet Patel’s interviews are not much focused on the lives or accomplishments of his subjects. He is much more concerned with the ideas they hold, the trendlines they observe, and what it all means for the future of humanity. The purpose of his history is to pull back the curtain on what a cohort of Silicon Valley giants think is happening and what AI has in store for us. It is a tall task, for very few have succeeded in faithfully communicating the intellectual environment that surrounds the AI industry. The written record as captured by outsiders is poor. To really understand what’s currently transpiring in the companies producing frontier AI requires a presence in the room with the engineers building it.
