Empire of AI - Outside of a Dog

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 …

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.

4 editions

benwerd@bookwyrm.social reviewed Empire of AI by Karen Hao

The chronicle of AI, the modern tech industry, and the fools that run it.

5 stars

In Empire of AI, Karen Hao has built a compelling portrait of the internal workings OpenAI, and through it, a portrait of both the AI movement and the modern tech industry. I hope that everyone who has contemplated bringing AI into their businesses and workflows reads it: the tools and even the promise of the technology has been shaped by these specific people and their assumptions, values, and worldviews.

The title is apt. OpenAI’s approach is empire — this is an organization that seeks to centralize power rather than democratize it. It readily sits on a shelf alongside books like Careless People, but the themes here are sometimes reminiscent of Succession. It’s about power. The whole industry is about power. And Hao lays it out clearly and beautifully.

We’re left with a little sprig of hope in the epilogue. I agree with the premise here: there’s a version …

In Empire of AI, Karen Hao has built a compelling portrait of the internal workings OpenAI, and through it, a portrait of both the AI movement and the modern tech industry. I hope that everyone who has contemplated bringing AI into their businesses and workflows reads it: the tools and even the promise of the technology has been shaped by these specific people and their assumptions, values, and worldviews.

The title is apt. OpenAI’s approach is empire — this is an organization that seeks to centralize power rather than democratize it. It readily sits on a shelf alongside books like Careless People, but the themes here are sometimes reminiscent of Succession. It’s about power. The whole industry is about power. And Hao lays it out clearly and beautifully.

We’re left with a little sprig of hope in the epilogue. I agree with the premise here: there’s a version of these technologies that are tightly bound, built respectfully, and aim to do one thing well. That’s the future. This idea that there should be one tool that does everything well, built with many billions of dollars, the exploitation of the global majority, and with neurotic executives with egos the size of warships at the helm, is not long for this world. May it depart quickly and with as little further damage as possible in its wake.