Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up, Charlie Munger advises in Poor Charlie’s Almanack. Originally published in 2005, this compilation of 11 talks by the legendary Berkshire Hathaway vice-chairman has become a touchstone for a generation of investors and entrepreneurs. Delivered with Munger’s characteristic rhetorical flair, Poor Charlie’s Almanack draws on his encyclopedic knowledge of business, finance, history, philosophy, physics, and ethics to introduce the latticework of mental models that underpin his rational and rigorous approach to life, learning, and decision-making. It is an essential volume for any reader seeking to go to bed a little wiser than when they woke up. This abridged edition features a new foreword by Stripe cofounder and president John Collison.
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, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—Dwarkesh Patel provides the first comprehensive and contemporary portrait of the technology that is transforming our world. Drawn from his interviews on the Dwarkesh Podcast, these curated excerpts range from the technical details of how LLMs work to the possibility of an AI takeover or explosive economic growth. It also includes 170+ definitions and visualizations, classic essays on the theme, and previously unpublished interviews. The Scaling Era offers readers unprecedented insight into a transformative moment in AI’s development—and a vision of what comes next.