Empire of AI

Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI

Karen Hao

When longtime AI expert and journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, it was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely market forces.

But the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that it requires an unprecedented amount of proprietary resources: the ‘compute’ power of scarce high-end chips, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans on the ground ‘cleaning it up’ for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the need for energy and water underlying everything. We have entered a new, ominous age of empire with OpenAI setting a breakneck pace, as a small group of the most valuable companies in human history try to chase it down.

In exhilarating prose and with unparalleled access to those closest to Sam Altman, Hao recounts the meteoric rise of OpenAI and shows us the sinister impact that this industry is having on society.

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ISBN:: 978-1-80206-465-0
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Artificial intelligence
OpenAI
ChatGPT

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5,0 stars

This book by acclaimed journalist Karen Hao should be required reading for everyone. Yes, everyone. With The Blip, Sam Altmans short-lived ouster from OpenAI, and the developments leading to it as the narrative frame, Hao dives deep info various aspects of the extractive nature of generative AI.

She draws convincing parallels to the vast empires of the 19th/early 20th century, which consolidated influence, resources and power around an imperial core profiting from the less-fortunate. Though sometimes a bit technical, Hao bolsters the theoretical with real-world stories, biographies and people, which make the concept of the real impact of generative AI that much more graspable.

Hao's accord is a damning one for the companies pushing genAI by any means necessary, but she also succinctly illustrates a way forward based on redistribution and decentralization. No wonder Sam Altman is angry about this book.