How We Got Here

David walks through how AI got practically useful, grounded in Dwarkesh Patel and Gavin Leech's The Scaling Era. The through-line: the future of AI has shown up long before it shipped, every single time. Seeing wasn't the hard part; believing it enough to bet on it was. He revisits the early scaling-law moments that should have been obvious to outsiders, asks why they weren't, and what today's people who use language models in their work should be willing to bet on now. Pair with next week's Edition 16, written with Rob Wild at L.E.K., on where things go from here. Plus three things worth knowing, three things to try, and what readers said.