Empire of AI
Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
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Narrateur(s):
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Karen Hao
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Auteur(s):
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Karen Hao
À propos de cet audio
“A bestselling page-turner that has made waves not just in Silicon Valley but around the world . . . With Empire of AI, Hao is fundamentally shaping many people’s perceptions and understanding of the company at the center of the AI revolution.” —TIME Magazine, “TIME100 AI 2025”
“Excellent and deeply reported.” —Tim Wu, The New York Times
“Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us.” —Vulture
From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy
When AI expert and investigative 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, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?
Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.
How empires work
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It does provide a good timeline of events, summarizing the various good and bad milestones OpenAI has had from its founding until early 2025. However (and I say this as someone who despises Sam Altman), it spends quite a bit of time discussing the allegations made against him by his sister and while it does try to present both sides, it clearly has one of its own it spends much more time on and it tries to waive off his sister's many documented mental illnesses as if they are not cause to doubt her. Several meandering chapters are also spent on the plight of those in third-world countries that the AI industry has taken advantage of, with broken promises of environmental impact and how they pay workers in these countries basically nothing to do screening of horrific content. These are good things to talk about, but the author has a very clear political bent and isn't afraid to go on long, preachy tangents that ultimately have little to do with the subject of the book and more just her wanting to lecture you. That's not what I'm here for, whether or not I agree with her points.
I also think they should have hired someone else to do the reading. Karen Hao's delivery is monotone and flat, sounding more like a news reader at half speed. Combine this with her pronouncing dates using an antiquted method, the way she misprounces an entire class of words (it's pronounced import-ant, not impor-ent as one example) and her haphazard attempt to pronounce foreign places and names in their native dialect and let's just say this is someone for whom voice acting is clearly not their chosen career path.
If you want good information to win arguments with an AI booster, you can find some here, but you can also find them in other places.
Little new information, poor delivery & preachy
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great book on AI
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Really good
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This book is a must read - especially for our politicians and leaders.
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