Early on, when all Mr. Patel had to show for himself was a couple of blog posts and one podcast episode featuring Mr. Caplan, Anil Varanasi, co-founder of Meter, a network-infrastructure company in San Francisco, reached out and asked how much Mr. Patel would need to keep doing what he was doing for six months. (Mr. Varanasi, a former student of Mr. Caplan’s, has made similar overtures to other promising young people.) Not much, said Mr. Patel, who was then living with his parents in Austin. Mr. Varanasi sent him $10,000. Mr. Caplan opened the door to other interviews, including Tyler Cowen and other George Mason economists. Mr. Cowen, through his Emergent Ventures program, himself later gave Mr. Patel a grant.
Besides the podcast, which at the time was largely focused on economics and history, Mr. Patel wrote blog posts that he now calls “insight porn.” “The Mystery of the Miracle Year,” which he published four months after graduating college, explored how Albert Einstein, among others, did most of his greatest work within a 12-month span. The post ended with an appeal to free “smart twentysomethings” from “rote menial work, prevent them from being overexposed to the current paradigm.” Viewing conventional wisdom and middle-class drudgery as impediments to innovation is the kind of self-validating thesis tech entrepreneurs love. Within two days of its posting, the Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen would both tweet links to the essay. More consequentially, Mr. Patel became the 42nd person Jeff Bezos was following on Twitter. He tweeted about this in wonderment. “You’re thoughtful and thought-provoking,” Mr. Bezos replied. “Gratitude. Please keep it up!” In 48 hours, Mr. Patel’s Twitter followers went from 800 to 14,000. His mother wondered whether he could ask Mr. Bezos for a job.
He moved to San Francisco shortly after the November 2022 release of ChatGPT. Suddenly, A.I. was the story of the era, what everyone in Mr. Patel’s fast-growing network was either working on or talking about, and San Francisco was where it was all happening. Early the next year, he secured an interview with Ilya Sutskever, then chief scientist at OpenAI, which received half a million views on YouTube. He sent a studiously granular list of questions in advance. “The amount of research he does just to make the ask is kind of absurd,” says Tamara Winter, the commissioning editor at Stripe Press, a book imprint started by the eponymous financial technology company.
When Stripe Press was throwing a pop-up gathering in London in the fall of 2023, Mr. Patel, who happened to be in town, showed up. There were a few hundred attendees, and clusters of bright-eyed young people gathered around him. “It turned into an impromptu Dwarkesh meet-up,” Ms. Winter recalls. She later commissioned and published a book-length distillation of his podcast, written by Mr. Patel with Gavin Leech. “The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025” has sold, she says, “tens of thousands of copies.”
