Empire of AI

An eye-opening account of the tech arms race shaping out planet, from an award-winning journalist and AI insider to the world of Sam Altman and OpenAI When longtime AI expert Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI, five years ago, 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 mercantile forces. But the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that breakthrough success requires an almost 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 up" the data 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 them down. With unparalleled access to Open AI, Hao tells the full story that shocked the entire tech industry--Altman's sudden firing by the Open AI board just as he seemed at the top of the world, and then the board's ignominious retreat and Altman's triumphant return. But this isn't just a tale of a single company and its team. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down on the darkling plain where the real suffering happens at impact, Empire of AI is the book we need to pierce the veil and bring the stakes into sharp focus.