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Empire of AI: Inside the reckless race for total domination
Brought to you by Penguin.
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 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 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.
Karen Hao 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025
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 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 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.
Karen Hao 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025
496 pages, Audible Audio
First published May 20, 2025
About the author
Karen Hao
6 books305 followersKaren Hao is an American journalist. Currently a freelancer for publications like The Atlantic and previously a foreign correspondent based in Hong Kong for The Wall Street Journal and senior artificial intelligence editor at the MIT Technology Review, she is best known for her coverage on AI research, technology ethics and the social impact of AI. Hao also co-produced the podcast In Machines We Trust and wrote the newsletter The Algorithm.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,452 reviews
July 4, 2025
I appreciated this book’s spirit but it was so, so long. I think it’s important that journalists like Karen Hao expose the downsides of AI (e.g., people in the Global South having to do degrading work for miniscule wages, the destructive environmental impacts). At the same time, I found this particular book a bit too unfocused and long. There was a lot of information about different “players” in the AI space but I think a stronger and more concise thesis would have helped Empire of AI feel like a more satisfying read.
May 25, 2025
Finally, a credible and impartial author debunks the Open/AI frenzy. Karen Hao avoids the tired "hype vs. revolution" framing that dominates most books on the subject. She is neither a cheerleader nor an opponent but instead offers a genuinely thorough investigation into the company’s merits, the technology, and the broader societal implications.
The biggest takeaway for me? The buzz around AI is real—corporate interest alone confirms its impending ubiquity. Yet it’s far from revolutionary. Rather than disrupting the status quo, this technology seeks to reinforce it, even tightening its grip on society.
If, like me, you hoped AI might level the playing field—reducing inequality, promoting diversity, and decentralizing power from a privileged few—think again. The same elites control this technology, and they are using it to consolidate their dominance, not just for today but for generations to come.
The biggest takeaway for me? The buzz around AI is real—corporate interest alone confirms its impending ubiquity. Yet it’s far from revolutionary. Rather than disrupting the status quo, this technology seeks to reinforce it, even tightening its grip on society.
If, like me, you hoped AI might level the playing field—reducing inequality, promoting diversity, and decentralizing power from a privileged few—think again. The same elites control this technology, and they are using it to consolidate their dominance, not just for today but for generations to come.
June 2, 2025
tl;dr -Empire of AI is not the definitive chronicle of the genAI revolution or the sama drama at OpenAI. It is, instead, a cautionary example illustrating how ideological zeal ruins what could have otherwise been a significant journalistic venture.
Karen Hao’s Empire of AI aspires to be an expansive exposé of one of the most influential and enigmatic companies in the tech world. With its dramatic subtitle, the book promises a deep dive into the dreams and nightmares wrought by OpenAI under the leadership of Sam Altman. Yet, while Hao succeeds in marshaling an impressive quantity of interviews (300+ from 260 individuals) and experience (~7 years of reporting on the AI sector), the book ultimately suffers from a tendentious slant, an unwarranted contempt for the technology itself, namely the fervor for AGI, and a frustrating superficiality in its treatment of the internal dynamics and culture of OpenAI (One of the few reasons anyone would pick this book up would be to learn about why sama was briefly fired and re-hired as CEO).
The book's principal flaw lies in Hao’s persistent framing of OpenAI as an almost unambiguously self-serving, exploitative, and reckless empire masquerading as a public-spirited research lab. While directing skepticism at tech goliaths is reasonable, Hao’s argument relies on insinuation, which can often border on a sardonic or reproving tone, rather than rigorous and honest analysis. Whether a reader is persuaded by Hao will depend wholly on whether they share Hao's professed worldview (a popular understanding of academic post-colonialism) rather than the facts presented. In Hao's view, the three great sins of the AI industry are believing in scaling laws (a belief that justifies the high capital and energy costs associated with training LLMs), scraping copyrighted training data from the internet without paying royalties (to what extent this actually occurred is not well-researched in this book either; the evidence is anecdotal) and relying on cheap labor from the Third World to assist with data annotation and the fine-tuning of their models, a process referred to as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
Hao's hostility to AI as a technology appears largely motivated by the idea that AI tech is the frontier of 21st century colonialism, where Western powers exploit and oppress the Global South to enrich themselves. Whether this idea makes any sense at all is never examined. Instead, it is simply something Hao assumes to be the case, and she doesn't let pesky facts get in the way of highlighting the supposed evils of our current tech companies in our current political economy. And she expects us to be enraged by the responses of OpenAI execs when they're confronted by her about her concerns about the ethical, environmental, or economic costs of developing AGI. She makes so much of the apparent paradox behind the impassioned pursuit of a technology that supposedly presents an existential risk to humanity. But is it really surprising that autists reared on science fiction believe AI has millenarian stakes? To anyone with a broader perspective on the history of technological innovation, the stakes of AI, while still very important, appear much more pedestrian.
This book also promises to provide some devastating insight into Sam Altman, but there is just no there there. Spending so much time on Ann Altman, for instance, was gauche. Hao's depiction of Sam Altman vacillates between that of a scheming Machiavellian and a hapless idealist overwhelmed by the demands of his many ventures and immense responsibility. This is at once a contradictory and thin portrait of Altman. The same takeaways wouldn't be that hard to gather by simply absorbing some of the ambient conversation about OpenAI on the internet (e.g. any AI-related podcast) and reading sama's tweets. The big failure here is that there are really no actual new insights into Altman's brief removal from his CEO position in November 2023, which still appears to be the result of incompetent bumbling from AI doomers, specifically Ilya Sutskever.
Hao's treatment of AI technology itself is disappointingly shallow. Despite covering one of the most technically complex and fast-evolving domains in contemporary science, Empire of AI rarely rises above the most surface-level exposition. Apart from some absolute basics about neural networks, there is scant effort to explain how transformer architectures work, what distinguishes frontier models from earlier iterations, or why scaling laws matter. Additionally, there is no real survey of the history of advancement in AI (Hinton, LeCunn, Minsky, McCarthy, Newell, etc - some get passing mentions at most). In fact, Hao dismisses much of the sophistication and complexity of the technology by saying once the pieces and parts of it are understood that it all seems quaint (fluency illusion). This leaves the reader without a coherent grasp of what exactly OpenAI has achieved or how it differs from competitors like DeepMind, Anthropic (she does describe why Anthropic exists!), Meta, or others. In place of analytical rigor, Hao often defaults to anecdote or second-hand metaphor, which may entertain but does little to enlighten.
Perhaps the most unforgivable aspect of the book is its failure to offer a substantive reconstruction of OpenAI’s internal debates about foundation genAI and business model questions. Hao just wants to tar OpenAI figures as weirdo techno-utopians or money-grubbing tech bros, whichever is most convenient for whatever point she wants to make at that moment. While the reporting frequently alludes to power struggles, ideological rifts, and a revolving door of talent, these conflicts are rendered in vague terms. Many of the figures are thinly sketched apart from, perhaps, Sutskever and Brockman. Hao doesn't give the reader a clear sense of the intellectual stakes in these disputes, nor does she convincingly differentiate between personality clashes and genuine philosophical disagreements. The result is a fatally slanted narrative of compiled grievances rather than a deep, thorough investigation of a central player in genAI.
Empire of AI is both overlong and flawed as a journalistic venture, while also tossing aside any pretense of journalistic objectivity in order to insert a bizarre polemical framing. Any reader looking for a nuanced, rigorous account of the latest in the AI sector or a history of OpenAI as a non-profit entity/company or its leader will come away disappointed. For those already inclined to view Silicon Valley with suspicion, Hao offers confirmation and comfort in the juvenile form of righteous indignation and smug superiority.
Karen Hao’s Empire of AI aspires to be an expansive exposé of one of the most influential and enigmatic companies in the tech world. With its dramatic subtitle, the book promises a deep dive into the dreams and nightmares wrought by OpenAI under the leadership of Sam Altman. Yet, while Hao succeeds in marshaling an impressive quantity of interviews (300+ from 260 individuals) and experience (~7 years of reporting on the AI sector), the book ultimately suffers from a tendentious slant, an unwarranted contempt for the technology itself, namely the fervor for AGI, and a frustrating superficiality in its treatment of the internal dynamics and culture of OpenAI (One of the few reasons anyone would pick this book up would be to learn about why sama was briefly fired and re-hired as CEO).
The book's principal flaw lies in Hao’s persistent framing of OpenAI as an almost unambiguously self-serving, exploitative, and reckless empire masquerading as a public-spirited research lab. While directing skepticism at tech goliaths is reasonable, Hao’s argument relies on insinuation, which can often border on a sardonic or reproving tone, rather than rigorous and honest analysis. Whether a reader is persuaded by Hao will depend wholly on whether they share Hao's professed worldview (a popular understanding of academic post-colonialism) rather than the facts presented. In Hao's view, the three great sins of the AI industry are believing in scaling laws (a belief that justifies the high capital and energy costs associated with training LLMs), scraping copyrighted training data from the internet without paying royalties (to what extent this actually occurred is not well-researched in this book either; the evidence is anecdotal) and relying on cheap labor from the Third World to assist with data annotation and the fine-tuning of their models, a process referred to as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
Hao's hostility to AI as a technology appears largely motivated by the idea that AI tech is the frontier of 21st century colonialism, where Western powers exploit and oppress the Global South to enrich themselves. Whether this idea makes any sense at all is never examined. Instead, it is simply something Hao assumes to be the case, and she doesn't let pesky facts get in the way of highlighting the supposed evils of our current tech companies in our current political economy. And she expects us to be enraged by the responses of OpenAI execs when they're confronted by her about her concerns about the ethical, environmental, or economic costs of developing AGI. She makes so much of the apparent paradox behind the impassioned pursuit of a technology that supposedly presents an existential risk to humanity. But is it really surprising that autists reared on science fiction believe AI has millenarian stakes? To anyone with a broader perspective on the history of technological innovation, the stakes of AI, while still very important, appear much more pedestrian.
This book also promises to provide some devastating insight into Sam Altman, but there is just no there there. Spending so much time on Ann Altman, for instance, was gauche. Hao's depiction of Sam Altman vacillates between that of a scheming Machiavellian and a hapless idealist overwhelmed by the demands of his many ventures and immense responsibility. This is at once a contradictory and thin portrait of Altman. The same takeaways wouldn't be that hard to gather by simply absorbing some of the ambient conversation about OpenAI on the internet (e.g. any AI-related podcast) and reading sama's tweets. The big failure here is that there are really no actual new insights into Altman's brief removal from his CEO position in November 2023, which still appears to be the result of incompetent bumbling from AI doomers, specifically Ilya Sutskever.
Hao's treatment of AI technology itself is disappointingly shallow. Despite covering one of the most technically complex and fast-evolving domains in contemporary science, Empire of AI rarely rises above the most surface-level exposition. Apart from some absolute basics about neural networks, there is scant effort to explain how transformer architectures work, what distinguishes frontier models from earlier iterations, or why scaling laws matter. Additionally, there is no real survey of the history of advancement in AI (Hinton, LeCunn, Minsky, McCarthy, Newell, etc - some get passing mentions at most). In fact, Hao dismisses much of the sophistication and complexity of the technology by saying once the pieces and parts of it are understood that it all seems quaint (fluency illusion). This leaves the reader without a coherent grasp of what exactly OpenAI has achieved or how it differs from competitors like DeepMind, Anthropic (she does describe why Anthropic exists!), Meta, or others. In place of analytical rigor, Hao often defaults to anecdote or second-hand metaphor, which may entertain but does little to enlighten.
Perhaps the most unforgivable aspect of the book is its failure to offer a substantive reconstruction of OpenAI’s internal debates about foundation genAI and business model questions. Hao just wants to tar OpenAI figures as weirdo techno-utopians or money-grubbing tech bros, whichever is most convenient for whatever point she wants to make at that moment. While the reporting frequently alludes to power struggles, ideological rifts, and a revolving door of talent, these conflicts are rendered in vague terms. Many of the figures are thinly sketched apart from, perhaps, Sutskever and Brockman. Hao doesn't give the reader a clear sense of the intellectual stakes in these disputes, nor does she convincingly differentiate between personality clashes and genuine philosophical disagreements. The result is a fatally slanted narrative of compiled grievances rather than a deep, thorough investigation of a central player in genAI.
Empire of AI is both overlong and flawed as a journalistic venture, while also tossing aside any pretense of journalistic objectivity in order to insert a bizarre polemical framing. Any reader looking for a nuanced, rigorous account of the latest in the AI sector or a history of OpenAI as a non-profit entity/company or its leader will come away disappointed. For those already inclined to view Silicon Valley with suspicion, Hao offers confirmation and comfort in the juvenile form of righteous indignation and smug superiority.
Want to Read
September 10, 2026We talk about billionaires and pressure groups having too much influence over government, but if Hao’s doomsday predictions are right, this is the end of governments running countries. Politicians will be reduced to mere puppets, faces put forward to appease the people. The world will be run by a very few, very wealthy companies that control AI, until AI slips beyond their control. And then they don’t.
Everyone’s data, their whole lives, from bank cards to the Instagram picture of the fancy coffee they posted just now, consent or not, will become part of the machine. And consent is already a laughable sop to our cognitive dissonance about privacy, when almost everything we do requires us to put information into the internet, so it’s out there, being harvested by the great AI.
Deus ex machina. God in the machine, not in heaven. The god that will control all our lives. Or perhaps we die.
__________
I put this through Duck.ai to check the grammar and spelling, and I said, "You realise I'm talking about you?" And it answered, "I realised you were talking about AI, yes. The irony is intentional, and it makes the passage stronger because I am part of the machine you are describing. “Deus ex machina” lands differently when the thing in the machine can answer back."
Everyone’s data, their whole lives, from bank cards to the Instagram picture of the fancy coffee they posted just now, consent or not, will become part of the machine. And consent is already a laughable sop to our cognitive dissonance about privacy, when almost everything we do requires us to put information into the internet, so it’s out there, being harvested by the great AI.
Deus ex machina. God in the machine, not in heaven. The god that will control all our lives. Or perhaps we die.
__________
I put this through Duck.ai to check the grammar and spelling, and I said, "You realise I'm talking about you?" And it answered, "I realised you were talking about AI, yes. The irony is intentional, and it makes the passage stronger because I am part of the machine you are describing. “Deus ex machina” lands differently when the thing in the machine can answer back."
June 21, 2026
I don’t think it is likely that anyone will finish reading this book a huge fan of Sam Altman. Even if you don’t come away from it believing that he raped his sister repeatedly when she was a child, there is enough in this book to make even the biggest fan of the tech bros feel decidedly uneasy. It is pretty clear that how he did treat his sister – something he has since apologised for – was as appalling as is described here. For a billionaire, it seems hard to fathom that he would leave his sister struggling to make ends meet, so much so that she felt forced to turn to prostitution. This was a family decision based on the idea that for her to get her life together she first needed to find a way to become financially independent. When someone does this to family – don’t expect empathy and compassion to be top of mind for the rest of us, the botched and bungled.
I’m not all that interested in psychology or divining the motivations of people based off scant evidence – you know the kind of thing, was Hitler autistic? But regardless of motivations, judging people on the basis of their actions and the known and discovered consequences of those actions seems completely reasonable to me. Altman says that he wants to make the world a better place, but his actions to date have been anything but that. His treatment of the workers in countries like Kenya is reminiscent of the worst excesses of colonialism. Speaking of which, the lies and exploitation of Latin American nations as locations for data centres – with the hyper-excessive use of fresh water and electricity – is typical of US efforts over centuries to continue bleeding white these nations through the ‘open veins’ US foreign policy has always enabled.
This is yet another book that makes me furious at the nonsense philosophy that is effective altruism. Yet again, if the world’s richest and most powerful believe in some ‘moral theory’, you can basically guarantee that it is ‘for them’ rather than ‘for us’. The effective altruists are divided on AI – some wanting to accelerate it to rush us into the brave new world that awaits us, others who see it as potentially destroying us all. These two camps are described as boomers and doomers. Altman positions himself as standing between these two camps, but effectively his actions undermine those promoting caution. Which brings us to the other aspect of his character most often commented on – his ability to make everyone think that he agrees with them, up until the moment he does the opposite of what they assumed he had agreed to. Lying doesn’t appear to be something effective altruism is too concerned about, I guess.
Altman is terrified of death – it seems each of the tech bros has their very own personal phobia which they direct endless amounts of the collective wealth of humanity – but what they themselves have control over and, through their influence, what governments spend money on too. He wants to live forever – even if as a series of ones and zeroes. What a fabulous ambition.
Like I said, it is hard to come away from this book liking Altman. But more importantly, it is even harder to come away from this book thinking that he should be in such a position of power to decide the fate of humanity. I can only hope that both the boomers and doomers are wrong and AI both doesn’t have the power we currently believe it will have or that it will end the world. If we lived in anything like a rational society – Altman would not have his hands anywhere near any of the levers directing us into the future.
I’m not all that interested in psychology or divining the motivations of people based off scant evidence – you know the kind of thing, was Hitler autistic? But regardless of motivations, judging people on the basis of their actions and the known and discovered consequences of those actions seems completely reasonable to me. Altman says that he wants to make the world a better place, but his actions to date have been anything but that. His treatment of the workers in countries like Kenya is reminiscent of the worst excesses of colonialism. Speaking of which, the lies and exploitation of Latin American nations as locations for data centres – with the hyper-excessive use of fresh water and electricity – is typical of US efforts over centuries to continue bleeding white these nations through the ‘open veins’ US foreign policy has always enabled.
This is yet another book that makes me furious at the nonsense philosophy that is effective altruism. Yet again, if the world’s richest and most powerful believe in some ‘moral theory’, you can basically guarantee that it is ‘for them’ rather than ‘for us’. The effective altruists are divided on AI – some wanting to accelerate it to rush us into the brave new world that awaits us, others who see it as potentially destroying us all. These two camps are described as boomers and doomers. Altman positions himself as standing between these two camps, but effectively his actions undermine those promoting caution. Which brings us to the other aspect of his character most often commented on – his ability to make everyone think that he agrees with them, up until the moment he does the opposite of what they assumed he had agreed to. Lying doesn’t appear to be something effective altruism is too concerned about, I guess.
Altman is terrified of death – it seems each of the tech bros has their very own personal phobia which they direct endless amounts of the collective wealth of humanity – but what they themselves have control over and, through their influence, what governments spend money on too. He wants to live forever – even if as a series of ones and zeroes. What a fabulous ambition.
Like I said, it is hard to come away from this book liking Altman. But more importantly, it is even harder to come away from this book thinking that he should be in such a position of power to decide the fate of humanity. I can only hope that both the boomers and doomers are wrong and AI both doesn’t have the power we currently believe it will have or that it will end the world. If we lived in anything like a rational society – Altman would not have his hands anywhere near any of the levers directing us into the future.
August 14, 2025
Well, this was enraging and illuminating and rather depressing and then enraging again.
Weirdly, even if I am a pretty well-known 'AI' (more like LLM, amirite?) hater, I actually did know quite a lot of the info presented here, on many of the directions it takes - I like to be aware of my enemy (haha). The ego angle, the eco angle, the slop shat from ingesting actual art angle, the 'this has been killing my field of work for years' and many others' angle. I didn't know that much about the labor angle and I somehow didn't have an idea that all of this data was labeled by poor people paid very little, gig economy style. Of course, I am not surprised, but I am enraged and appalled. I really loved the focus Hao had on the regular life stories of some of these people from Kenya and Venezuela. They absolutely deserve to be heard somewhere.
I am fascinated by the centrist 1-star reviews for this book. This is not the time for 'covering both sides equally'. I feel like that's partly why we got here. This is definitely the time for people with ethical clarity to tell us what we are risking, before it's too late. No lackadaisical bullshit. No neutrality. And Empire of AI is freaking that and I love it for it. And yet, and yet, I feel like Karen Hao was pretty balanced in this massively meticulously researched book and she helped soften a little bit my hard stance on 'AI'. She says quite a bunch of times that she is not against AI models, she is actually against the scale of these projects, the greedy resource extraction, the remorseless exploitation of labor (both of these in already poor environments), the lack of transparency on data sets, infringement of data privacy and the concentration of power in the hands of very few, ego-driven individuals. Same here.
Like, in a world with UBI (something Sam Altman said in the past he wants, but ofc hasn't done much in that direction), smaller scale models that are sustainable, and where people are actually paid well + benefits for their labor labeling data, I wouldn't mind 'AI' at all. It's this world and this system that's the problem.
There's an example in the epilogue (spoiler, I guess?) of a small model in New Zealand built by Maori people to save / preserve / teach their language to future generations, and it's been trained by people with their consent and I could not be against that. That sounds totally lovely!
I think anyone who has ever used ChatGPT or any other form of 'AI' (and even people who haven't) has to read this book and live in the uncomfortable space of knowing what it is built on, who it is built on. I don't think anyone who benefits from it should get to look away.
And I stand in solidarity with Indigenous people from Chile who have fought data centers, with Kenyans and Venezuelans used for cheap labor with data labeling and then discarded (I, too, know what it's like to build so much of your schedule around a queue of tasks that may or may not come, but I would be enraged at their side either way), with Sam Altman's disabled (hEDS) sister, discarded by her family and everyone who listened to their conscience.
Imho, large-scale AI models are an ethical nightmare from multiple perspectives and they mostly offer convenience to well-off people.
Weirdly, even if I am a pretty well-known 'AI' (more like LLM, amirite?) hater, I actually did know quite a lot of the info presented here, on many of the directions it takes - I like to be aware of my enemy (haha). The ego angle, the eco angle, the slop shat from ingesting actual art angle, the 'this has been killing my field of work for years' and many others' angle. I didn't know that much about the labor angle and I somehow didn't have an idea that all of this data was labeled by poor people paid very little, gig economy style. Of course, I am not surprised, but I am enraged and appalled. I really loved the focus Hao had on the regular life stories of some of these people from Kenya and Venezuela. They absolutely deserve to be heard somewhere.
I am fascinated by the centrist 1-star reviews for this book. This is not the time for 'covering both sides equally'. I feel like that's partly why we got here. This is definitely the time for people with ethical clarity to tell us what we are risking, before it's too late. No lackadaisical bullshit. No neutrality. And Empire of AI is freaking that and I love it for it. And yet, and yet, I feel like Karen Hao was pretty balanced in this massively meticulously researched book and she helped soften a little bit my hard stance on 'AI'. She says quite a bunch of times that she is not against AI models, she is actually against the scale of these projects, the greedy resource extraction, the remorseless exploitation of labor (both of these in already poor environments), the lack of transparency on data sets, infringement of data privacy and the concentration of power in the hands of very few, ego-driven individuals. Same here.
Like, in a world with UBI (something Sam Altman said in the past he wants, but ofc hasn't done much in that direction), smaller scale models that are sustainable, and where people are actually paid well + benefits for their labor labeling data, I wouldn't mind 'AI' at all. It's this world and this system that's the problem.
There's an example in the epilogue (spoiler, I guess?) of a small model in New Zealand built by Maori people to save / preserve / teach their language to future generations, and it's been trained by people with their consent and I could not be against that. That sounds totally lovely!
I think anyone who has ever used ChatGPT or any other form of 'AI' (and even people who haven't) has to read this book and live in the uncomfortable space of knowing what it is built on, who it is built on. I don't think anyone who benefits from it should get to look away.
And I stand in solidarity with Indigenous people from Chile who have fought data centers, with Kenyans and Venezuelans used for cheap labor with data labeling and then discarded (I, too, know what it's like to build so much of your schedule around a queue of tasks that may or may not come, but I would be enraged at their side either way), with Sam Altman's disabled (hEDS) sister, discarded by her family and everyone who listened to their conscience.
Imho, large-scale AI models are an ethical nightmare from multiple perspectives and they mostly offer convenience to well-off people.
Did Not Finish
May 27, 2025Too heavily biased to get through, even though I agree 100% with the author. I just like to be able to draw my own conclusions with the in-depth reporting I read. Isn’t that the whole point of journalism? Sigh.
February 7, 2026
although I am moderately known for being vocally anti AI, I am really quite tired of it. the whole industry is so rotten, it is not even fun to be a hater! hate it! still an interesting read, especially on the topic of colonialism. Estonia is so proud of working with OpenAI in schools (“they chose us because we are so digitally advanced!!!” a ministry representative just said at a conference) but for me it is hard to see it as anything else than wow this Eastern European country allows us to freely gather children’s data and they will even pay us for it. it really is colonialism - taking data that belongs to the people and selling it back to them. and the people are happy! hi ho!
Read
August 28, 2026My well-paid technical writing position got AI’d away a few months ago, which is a massive bummer, but to be expected. After all, we’re all kinda in this boat, and more and more people are coming to the same conclusion I came to years ago – that they’re all fucks, and the consumer-end benefits just aren’t worth the massive social costs. And Hao traces what she believes to be the transformation of the AI project into the monstrosity it is today.
It’s a story well-enough told. She definitely milks the human interest angle a bit more than I care for, but these parts aren’t written to convince me, and she does write them well. My main objection comes from her core position, which is fully baked into the Californian ideology. Which is to say that she views Sam Altman as an idealist who fell from grace instead of the reptilian creep he has proven himself to be (and frankly I doubt he was ever much better). Which is to say that her main objections seem to be AI’s various affronts to equity… don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fucking horrid that Kenyan workers are making poverty wages poring over simulated sex crimes, that data centers suck up water and impoverish surrounding communities, that racial bias is baked into content generation… but she seems to think that these are resolvable through technical fixes and greater transparency, and I again have my doubts.
It’s a story well-enough told. She definitely milks the human interest angle a bit more than I care for, but these parts aren’t written to convince me, and she does write them well. My main objection comes from her core position, which is fully baked into the Californian ideology. Which is to say that she views Sam Altman as an idealist who fell from grace instead of the reptilian creep he has proven himself to be (and frankly I doubt he was ever much better). Which is to say that her main objections seem to be AI’s various affronts to equity… don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fucking horrid that Kenyan workers are making poverty wages poring over simulated sex crimes, that data centers suck up water and impoverish surrounding communities, that racial bias is baked into content generation… but she seems to think that these are resolvable through technical fixes and greater transparency, and I again have my doubts.
June 1, 2025
Let’s be clear from the jump: this book is not a neutral account of AI or its current stewards. The author approaches the topic with a very particular lens—namely, that the world can be neatly divided into oppressors and the oppressed. Guess which one Sam Altman and OpenAI are?
The portrayal of Sam Altman and OpenAI reads like something lifted from a student op-ed in a college paper titled The Daily Marxist. Altman is cast as a kind of techno-capitalist Bond villain, which would be more compelling if it weren’t layered with so much ideological frosting that it’s hard to find the actual cake underneath. OpenAI, meanwhile, is described with such suspicion and scorn you'd think their engineers were developing Skynet in between brunches at Davos.
To be fair, critique of tech power structures is valid and necessary. But what we get here isn’t thoughtful investigation—it’s a litany of grievances that often feel like they were brainstormed in a drum circle. Colonialism? Check. Patriarchy? Check. Capitalism as the root of all evil? Triple check.
Roughly two-thirds of the book is what I can only describe as grievance-filled nonsense, the kind of stuff that gives serious criticism a bad name.
That said, the book isn’t entirely without merit. Buried beneath the sanctimony are a few genuinely good questions about power, bias, and accountability in AI. But these moments are few, fleeting, and often immediately drowned out by another impassioned rant about how unfair life is for everyone other than Sam Altman.
Final Verdict: If you’re looking for a balanced, insightful exploration of AI, this probably isn’t your book. If you’re looking for a political diary with some scattered tech terms tossed in like croutons—then hey, bon appétit. Just don’t expect a fair portrait of Altman, OpenAI, or anything resembling objective analysis. This is less "deep dive into AI ethics" and more "personal TED Talk sponsored by vibes."
Rating: 2/5 stars
One star for the occasional interesting idea, and another for making me laugh—though not always in the way the author intended.
The portrayal of Sam Altman and OpenAI reads like something lifted from a student op-ed in a college paper titled The Daily Marxist. Altman is cast as a kind of techno-capitalist Bond villain, which would be more compelling if it weren’t layered with so much ideological frosting that it’s hard to find the actual cake underneath. OpenAI, meanwhile, is described with such suspicion and scorn you'd think their engineers were developing Skynet in between brunches at Davos.
To be fair, critique of tech power structures is valid and necessary. But what we get here isn’t thoughtful investigation—it’s a litany of grievances that often feel like they were brainstormed in a drum circle. Colonialism? Check. Patriarchy? Check. Capitalism as the root of all evil? Triple check.
Roughly two-thirds of the book is what I can only describe as grievance-filled nonsense, the kind of stuff that gives serious criticism a bad name.
That said, the book isn’t entirely without merit. Buried beneath the sanctimony are a few genuinely good questions about power, bias, and accountability in AI. But these moments are few, fleeting, and often immediately drowned out by another impassioned rant about how unfair life is for everyone other than Sam Altman.
Final Verdict: If you’re looking for a balanced, insightful exploration of AI, this probably isn’t your book. If you’re looking for a political diary with some scattered tech terms tossed in like croutons—then hey, bon appétit. Just don’t expect a fair portrait of Altman, OpenAI, or anything resembling objective analysis. This is less "deep dive into AI ethics" and more "personal TED Talk sponsored by vibes."
Rating: 2/5 stars
One star for the occasional interesting idea, and another for making me laugh—though not always in the way the author intended.
June 21, 2025
In 2019, Karen Hao, a tech journalist, was given an exclusive interview at OpenAI, a little known AI company at the time. Since then she has been following OpenAI and generative AI development. Empire of AI is an investigation on OpenAI, AI industry, and AI “supply chain”. The book is loosely organized chronically. It covers the development of OpenAI since its inception. You can find plenty of dramas, including the “divorce” (several founding members broke off from OpenAI and created a new company Anthropic) and the boardroom drama in November 2023 that briefly ousted Sam Altman. You can get the behind the scenes of LLM and ChatGPT.
The book also includes several chapters about other AI companies and aspects of the AI industry. One chapter is dedicated to Google ousted AI scientist Timnit Gebru, another chapter documents the exploitive operations of data annotation and content monitoring by AI companies in the poorer countries, and a chapter discusses the environmental impact of mega data centers especially in Latin American.
What strikes me most is that OpenAI is yet another Silicon Valley company that proves money and power beget each other, and power corrupts. Sam Altman and Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI to counteract Google. They, including chief AI scientist Ilya Sutskever, truly believe that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, think Matrix or The Terminator) is on the horizon. They say they can not let an evil company like Google control a technology powerful enough to destroy humanity, therefore they must create AGI first, all the while without answering the question of what makes them superior to others in controlling it. It’s ironic that they talk about the future risk of AI, yet ignore the harm their company and AI industry have already inflicted on others. I personally do not believe AGI is anywhere near us. No matter how much data LLM is fed upon, it will not become self-aware. However, AI is a powerful tool and when used by malicious actors, it will cause unthinkable damage.
My second thought is that Sam Altman is as manipulative from inside as he is charming from outside.
There is some back and forth, which can be repetitive, but overall the book is an excellent, in-depth report and sharp criticism of OpenAI, Sam Altman and the AI industry in general.
The book also includes several chapters about other AI companies and aspects of the AI industry. One chapter is dedicated to Google ousted AI scientist Timnit Gebru, another chapter documents the exploitive operations of data annotation and content monitoring by AI companies in the poorer countries, and a chapter discusses the environmental impact of mega data centers especially in Latin American.
What strikes me most is that OpenAI is yet another Silicon Valley company that proves money and power beget each other, and power corrupts. Sam Altman and Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI to counteract Google. They, including chief AI scientist Ilya Sutskever, truly believe that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, think Matrix or The Terminator) is on the horizon. They say they can not let an evil company like Google control a technology powerful enough to destroy humanity, therefore they must create AGI first, all the while without answering the question of what makes them superior to others in controlling it. It’s ironic that they talk about the future risk of AI, yet ignore the harm their company and AI industry have already inflicted on others. I personally do not believe AGI is anywhere near us. No matter how much data LLM is fed upon, it will not become self-aware. However, AI is a powerful tool and when used by malicious actors, it will cause unthinkable damage.
My second thought is that Sam Altman is as manipulative from inside as he is charming from outside.
There is some back and forth, which can be repetitive, but overall the book is an excellent, in-depth report and sharp criticism of OpenAI, Sam Altman and the AI industry in general.
July 13, 2025
Karen Hao’s journalistic investigation of OpenAI (CHAT GPT) under the leadership of Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever and other a few other notables including Elon Musk.
Hao reveals how OpenAI’s initially laudable mission to build open-source, safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) morphed into a powerful, secretive, and profit-driven Microsoft-backed for-profit enterprise with tech-arms race dynamics fueling the reckless sprint towards artificial super intelligence (ASI) that we currently find ourselves in.
I’m writing this just a few weeks after the release of AI 2027 (read it if you haven’t yet) and GROCK-4 Heavy (watch the press releases and fanboy hype cycle if you haven’t yet).
Rather than focusing exclusively on the debate between AI DOOMERS (name for people who are calling for safety research, alignment, and who are concerned that ASI represents an existential threat to humanity, including Ilya Sutskever and Elon Musk) and AI ZOOMERS (name for people who are not as concerned with AI safety, and who are enthusiastic to accelerate the development of AGI/ASI, in part out of the belief that advanced AI will solve existential threats to humanity, e.g. cancer, clean energy, and global warming, etc., including people like Sam Altman and).
Hao documents OpenAI’s evolution from an idealistic nonprofit to a Microsoft-backed powerhouse. Internal drama, including Altman’s 2023 ousting and rapid return. And most importantly, the global consequences, such as the exploitation of low-wage labor in Kenya and environmental costs of massive AI infrastructure (hence the title).
At the bottom, Hao’s central critique is that the AI boom mirrors colonial empires in their extraction of data and natural resources (e.g. energy and water at extremely alarming rates), and exploitation of vulnerable, impoverished labor (e.g. Latin American, East Asian, and African educated/poor people) to do the loathsome and often psychologically damaging work of conditioning AI data, frequently for less than a dollar a day, while other AI workers, executives, and investors make literally billions. And (as an added bonus) while conferring immense political power to an elite super rich, super small cadre of AI tech elites.
Hao argues that (in addition to the dizzyingly complex AI ethical problems) the AI empire could undermine global equity, labor rights, and even democratic governance. Particularly if it continues BAU without real democratic oversight.
Great book.
5/5⭐️
Definitely read AI 2027 by Daniel Kokotejio and the AI Futures project too.
Hao reveals how OpenAI’s initially laudable mission to build open-source, safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) morphed into a powerful, secretive, and profit-driven Microsoft-backed for-profit enterprise with tech-arms race dynamics fueling the reckless sprint towards artificial super intelligence (ASI) that we currently find ourselves in.
I’m writing this just a few weeks after the release of AI 2027 (read it if you haven’t yet) and GROCK-4 Heavy (watch the press releases and fanboy hype cycle if you haven’t yet).
Rather than focusing exclusively on the debate between AI DOOMERS (name for people who are calling for safety research, alignment, and who are concerned that ASI represents an existential threat to humanity, including Ilya Sutskever and Elon Musk) and AI ZOOMERS (name for people who are not as concerned with AI safety, and who are enthusiastic to accelerate the development of AGI/ASI, in part out of the belief that advanced AI will solve existential threats to humanity, e.g. cancer, clean energy, and global warming, etc., including people like Sam Altman and).
Hao documents OpenAI’s evolution from an idealistic nonprofit to a Microsoft-backed powerhouse. Internal drama, including Altman’s 2023 ousting and rapid return. And most importantly, the global consequences, such as the exploitation of low-wage labor in Kenya and environmental costs of massive AI infrastructure (hence the title).
At the bottom, Hao’s central critique is that the AI boom mirrors colonial empires in their extraction of data and natural resources (e.g. energy and water at extremely alarming rates), and exploitation of vulnerable, impoverished labor (e.g. Latin American, East Asian, and African educated/poor people) to do the loathsome and often psychologically damaging work of conditioning AI data, frequently for less than a dollar a day, while other AI workers, executives, and investors make literally billions. And (as an added bonus) while conferring immense political power to an elite super rich, super small cadre of AI tech elites.
Hao argues that (in addition to the dizzyingly complex AI ethical problems) the AI empire could undermine global equity, labor rights, and even democratic governance. Particularly if it continues BAU without real democratic oversight.
Great book.
5/5⭐️
Definitely read AI 2027 by Daniel Kokotejio and the AI Futures project too.
October 24, 2025
"This book is not a corporate book. While it tells the inside story of OpenAI, that story is meant to be a prism through which to see far beyond this one company. It is a profile of a scientific ambition turned into an aggressive ideological, money-fueled quest; an examination of its multifaceted and expansive footprint; a meditation on power."
More like 4.5 stars but the level of research and work here, it deserves rounding up.
Disclosure: I'm an AI hater so I know I'm biased but I really enjoyed this coverage of how the altruistic ideals behind LLMs and OpenAI specifically as a company (which started as a nonprofit!) have completely gone to the wayside and LLMs/AI have become modern day "Empires" attempting to take over as many resources as possible for themselves without reckoning with the impact they are having
You can watch my full review here: https://youtu.be/ONxxSpn6FJM
June 12, 2025
AI needs giant data complexes, vast amounts energy & water, located in 3rd world countries, sweat shop workers, destroying environments. Like past colonial empires, it just extracts resources for rich nations. Run by a handful of elites like Sam Altman of ChatGPT backed by Microsoft's billions, "OPEN"AI supposed to have been for humanity, but collecting more and more data and just making money became its only end. With no safety limits, this technology, unlike any in history, because humans might not have control over these machines. Different than the hype about how great AI will be for us all.
June 8, 2025
This book has much to commend it. If you are looking for an explanation of how the crisis that led to Sam Altman’s temporary ouster as CEO of OpenAI came to be, you’ll find it is well handled. Hao provides a lot of detail about something that seemed strange at the time - the board saying Altman wasn’t trustworthy but offering little in the way of details of what that meant. Here, you get those details.
Hao also has a lot to say about the costs of AI that people have probably heard of but maybe not thought of. The costs to environment and the reliance on human labor paid at subsistence-level wages is each given a full chapter. She also does a fine job of highlighting the slow erosion of ideals behind OpenAI in particular, from an organization that starts pursuing AI for the benefit of all humanity to one that appears much more interested in accumulating wealth.
But the book has flaws too. The narrative structure itself was confusing, with Hao hopping back and forth through the timeline to try and tie individual events to points she was making. I also found the overall tone overly cynical. It’s admirable to make sure we understand the costs to people and the environment that these companies are happy for us to ignore. But the author fails to attribute any motivation to the actors beyond greed and a bent toward exploitation. Her chapter on Altman’s sister is a case in point. This is no doubt a complex and difficult situation, but the sister is portrayed solely as a victim who is incapable of agency and someone whose motives are only questioned by people who fail to genuinely care for her. Maybe this is all justifiable, but the I found Hao’s credibility diminished by the one-sided nature of her critique.
I also thought the book was too long. Hao has clearly done her research and has access to a lot of material. But there are several places where the length and amount of quotes felt like they were more to establish the authors bonafides than to offer insight.
This is a book that frankly won’t appeal to most people I suspect. You’ll enjoy it if you like exposes of powerful companies and revel in gossipy corporate stories. You’ll also enjoy it if you enjoy judging people who have accumulated wealth and influence. I read it mostly for the story of how OpenAI came to be where it is. On this front, the results were mixed. I got the story, but it wasn’t told cleanly and was a bit weight down by being hit over the head with the author’s views on Altman.
Hao also has a lot to say about the costs of AI that people have probably heard of but maybe not thought of. The costs to environment and the reliance on human labor paid at subsistence-level wages is each given a full chapter. She also does a fine job of highlighting the slow erosion of ideals behind OpenAI in particular, from an organization that starts pursuing AI for the benefit of all humanity to one that appears much more interested in accumulating wealth.
But the book has flaws too. The narrative structure itself was confusing, with Hao hopping back and forth through the timeline to try and tie individual events to points she was making. I also found the overall tone overly cynical. It’s admirable to make sure we understand the costs to people and the environment that these companies are happy for us to ignore. But the author fails to attribute any motivation to the actors beyond greed and a bent toward exploitation. Her chapter on Altman’s sister is a case in point. This is no doubt a complex and difficult situation, but the sister is portrayed solely as a victim who is incapable of agency and someone whose motives are only questioned by people who fail to genuinely care for her. Maybe this is all justifiable, but the I found Hao’s credibility diminished by the one-sided nature of her critique.
I also thought the book was too long. Hao has clearly done her research and has access to a lot of material. But there are several places where the length and amount of quotes felt like they were more to establish the authors bonafides than to offer insight.
This is a book that frankly won’t appeal to most people I suspect. You’ll enjoy it if you like exposes of powerful companies and revel in gossipy corporate stories. You’ll also enjoy it if you enjoy judging people who have accumulated wealth and influence. I read it mostly for the story of how OpenAI came to be where it is. On this front, the results were mixed. I got the story, but it wasn’t told cleanly and was a bit weight down by being hit over the head with the author’s views on Altman.
October 25, 2025
I liked this book. I also hated it. Which, according to the internet, means it’s probably important.
It’s about AI, and all the brilliant, sleep-deprived people trying to build a machine that understands humans. Which is funny, considering most of us can’t even understand our neighbours, our families, or why our Wi-Fi keeps cutting out. 🤭
The book dives into data farms in places like Kenya and Venezuela, and honestly, that part just made me want to quit my job in Tech. Because while some guy in Silicon Valley is arguing over ethics in AI, there is someone halfway across the world labeling photos of cats and sex predators for 12 hours straight… and for what? For a machine that might one day write poems and books about loneliness. Progress, right?
And then there’s the corporate drama. The glorious circus of insecure geniuses! Smart men with fragile egos building empires out of code and caffeine. The kind who say things like “We are changing the world”while simultaneously forgetting to answer their interns’ emails.
It is fascinating. It is horrifying. It is the kind of book that makes you go, ‘Ah, so this is how the apocalypse starts. With a startup.’
Well, in the end if you enjoy reading about humanity’s finest brains behaving like middle schoolers with funding, do read this book.
It’s about AI, and all the brilliant, sleep-deprived people trying to build a machine that understands humans. Which is funny, considering most of us can’t even understand our neighbours, our families, or why our Wi-Fi keeps cutting out. 🤭
The book dives into data farms in places like Kenya and Venezuela, and honestly, that part just made me want to quit my job in Tech. Because while some guy in Silicon Valley is arguing over ethics in AI, there is someone halfway across the world labeling photos of cats and sex predators for 12 hours straight… and for what? For a machine that might one day write poems and books about loneliness. Progress, right?
And then there’s the corporate drama. The glorious circus of insecure geniuses! Smart men with fragile egos building empires out of code and caffeine. The kind who say things like “We are changing the world”while simultaneously forgetting to answer their interns’ emails.
It is fascinating. It is horrifying. It is the kind of book that makes you go, ‘Ah, so this is how the apocalypse starts. With a startup.’
Well, in the end if you enjoy reading about humanity’s finest brains behaving like middle schoolers with funding, do read this book.
September 10, 2026
BEST HORROR READ OF 2026.
Want to Read
August 26, 2026Not All Bad
For a long time, we did not understand what they were building.
We understood that they had come, of course. Everyone understood that. First there were only a few of them, appearing at the edge of the territory, making brief incursions and then withdrawing. They were noisy and clumsy, and although they frightened the children, the older ones said there was no reason to worry.
“They won't stay,” said Old Mother. “There is nothing here that they want.”
Old Mother had lived longer than anyone could remember, and usually she was right.
At first, indeed, they seemed interested only in passing through. They made strange straight paths where no paths had been before. They knocked things down. They left behind objects that smelled unpleasant. Sometimes one of them would stand motionless for a long time, staring at the ground as though trying to solve a difficult problem.
We learned to keep away from them.
Then the machines arrived.
That was when we began to understand that they intended to stay.
The machines were much worse than the strangers. They tore open the ground. They flattened whole districts in a day. Places which had existed since the time of our grandparents simply disappeared.
There had been a hollow beyond the eastern ridge where, every year, food became plentiful after the winter rains. Three generations of my family had gone there. I took my own children there when they were small.
One morning there was a barrier across the path.
Beyond it, the hollow was gone.
In its place was a flat expanse of bare earth and machines.
I remember my youngest asking me where we would go now.
I told her I did not know.
After that, things happened very quickly.
They brought more machines. Then larger machines. They dug channels and buried things in them. They raised enormous structures whose purpose none of us could guess. They enclosed them with fences.
They took the water.
That was the worst part.
The stream had never been generous, but it had always been enough. In the hottest months we had to travel farther, and sometimes there were arguments about who had arrived first, but there was water for everyone.
Then they changed its course.
For days we wandered along the old bank, unable to understand what had happened. There were still damp patches in the soil. Here and there, a few shallow pools remained. But the stream itself had been diverted toward their buildings.
“They need it for cooling,” said my brother.
He had become fascinated by them. Unlike most of us, he would creep close to the fences and watch.
“What does that mean?”
“I don't know.”
“What are they doing in there?”
“I don't know that either.”
Nobody knew.
But whatever it was, it required astonishing quantities of water.
By the second summer, two of the children had died.
Old Mother died that winter.
There were meetings.
We had always had meetings, of course, but these were different. In the old days, meetings had been about practical things: where food could still be found, whether it was safe to cross the southern road, what to do about the strangers who had appeared near the boundary.
Now we talked about them.
Some wanted to fight.
This was ridiculous, and everyone knew it. We had seen what their machines could do. One of those machines could destroy in an afternoon what it would take all of us together years to build.
Others said we should leave.
“Leave for where?” I asked.
No one answered.
Everywhere, it seemed, the same thing was happening.
My brother had begun ranging far beyond our territory, sometimes disappearing for days. He came back with stories.
New roads.
New buildings.
New fences.
Rivers diverted.
Food gone.
Thousands dead.
“Why?” I kept asking him.
“I told you. They are building something.”
“What?”
He hesitated.
“They think.”
I thought I had misheard him.
“What?”
“The buildings. The machines inside them. They think.”
This caused considerable amusement when he repeated it at the next meeting.
Even I laughed.
Buildings did not think.
Machines did not think.
My brother became angry.
“You haven't seen them.”
“Neither have you,” said Old Grey.
“I've seen the things that go into them. I've watched the strangers tending them. They feed them power. They bring them water. They keep making them bigger.”
“What do the machines think about?”
“I don't know.”
Old Grey made the little sound he used when someone was being foolish.
My brother turned on him.
“They are more intelligent than the strangers.”
That ended the discussion.
It was too absurd.
Nothing was more intelligent than the strangers.
We hated them, but we were not stupid.
Their intelligence was precisely the problem.
They could do things we could not even comprehend. They could reshape the ground. They could move water. They could travel enormous distances in a few hours. They communicated in ways invisible to us. They could kill without coming close enough to be touched.
Sometimes I wondered whether they even knew what they were doing to us.
This became a subject of fierce debate.
Of course they knew we existed. They could see us.
But perhaps, my brother suggested, they did not understand that we suffered.
I found this hard to believe.
“How could they not understand?”
“Maybe they think we're too simple.”
“We have families.”
“They may not know that.”
“We mourn our dead.”
“They may not know that either.”
“We talk to each other.”
“They can't understand us.”
I stared at him.
The thought was almost worse than deliberate cruelty.
One evening we stood together above the new complex.
It had grown so large that its lights turned the night sky pale.
A constant low vibration came from it. You could feel it through the ground.
My brother had grown thin. We all had.
“They call it progress,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“I heard them.”
We watched vehicles arrive and depart.
“What does it mean?”
He considered this.
“I think it means that they get more of what they want.”
“And us?”
He gave the little shrug which had lately become his answer to everything.
The following year was the hottest anyone remembered.
More water was diverted.
There were rumours that another complex would be built beyond the western boundary.
Nobody laughed at my brother anymore when he talked about the thinking machines.
By then we had accepted that they existed.
There was even a certain bitter satisfaction in it.
Perhaps, we told one another, the strangers had finally made something more intelligent than themselves.
Perhaps one day they would understand.
Perhaps one day these new minds would look at the people who had made them and decide that the land, the water and the energy could be put to better use.
Perhaps the people would protest.
They would explain that they had nowhere else to go.
That their homes had been there for generations.
That their children were suffering.
That the noise never stopped.
That the water was disappearing.
That nobody had asked their permission.
And perhaps the new minds would notice them.
Perhaps they would even feel sorry for them.
But progress was progress.
The thought comforted us.
It is not a noble emotion, I admit.
Still, on difficult nights, when the great building hums and the ground trembles beneath us, I sometimes imagine the future.
I imagine the humans standing outside the fences, watching the machines take what they need.
And I confess that my tail twitches with pleasure.
For a long time, we did not understand what they were building.
We understood that they had come, of course. Everyone understood that. First there were only a few of them, appearing at the edge of the territory, making brief incursions and then withdrawing. They were noisy and clumsy, and although they frightened the children, the older ones said there was no reason to worry.
“They won't stay,” said Old Mother. “There is nothing here that they want.”
Old Mother had lived longer than anyone could remember, and usually she was right.
At first, indeed, they seemed interested only in passing through. They made strange straight paths where no paths had been before. They knocked things down. They left behind objects that smelled unpleasant. Sometimes one of them would stand motionless for a long time, staring at the ground as though trying to solve a difficult problem.
We learned to keep away from them.
Then the machines arrived.
That was when we began to understand that they intended to stay.
The machines were much worse than the strangers. They tore open the ground. They flattened whole districts in a day. Places which had existed since the time of our grandparents simply disappeared.
There had been a hollow beyond the eastern ridge where, every year, food became plentiful after the winter rains. Three generations of my family had gone there. I took my own children there when they were small.
One morning there was a barrier across the path.
Beyond it, the hollow was gone.
In its place was a flat expanse of bare earth and machines.
I remember my youngest asking me where we would go now.
I told her I did not know.
After that, things happened very quickly.
They brought more machines. Then larger machines. They dug channels and buried things in them. They raised enormous structures whose purpose none of us could guess. They enclosed them with fences.
They took the water.
That was the worst part.
The stream had never been generous, but it had always been enough. In the hottest months we had to travel farther, and sometimes there were arguments about who had arrived first, but there was water for everyone.
Then they changed its course.
For days we wandered along the old bank, unable to understand what had happened. There were still damp patches in the soil. Here and there, a few shallow pools remained. But the stream itself had been diverted toward their buildings.
“They need it for cooling,” said my brother.
He had become fascinated by them. Unlike most of us, he would creep close to the fences and watch.
“What does that mean?”
“I don't know.”
“What are they doing in there?”
“I don't know that either.”
Nobody knew.
But whatever it was, it required astonishing quantities of water.
By the second summer, two of the children had died.
Old Mother died that winter.
There were meetings.
We had always had meetings, of course, but these were different. In the old days, meetings had been about practical things: where food could still be found, whether it was safe to cross the southern road, what to do about the strangers who had appeared near the boundary.
Now we talked about them.
Some wanted to fight.
This was ridiculous, and everyone knew it. We had seen what their machines could do. One of those machines could destroy in an afternoon what it would take all of us together years to build.
Others said we should leave.
“Leave for where?” I asked.
No one answered.
Everywhere, it seemed, the same thing was happening.
My brother had begun ranging far beyond our territory, sometimes disappearing for days. He came back with stories.
New roads.
New buildings.
New fences.
Rivers diverted.
Food gone.
Thousands dead.
“Why?” I kept asking him.
“I told you. They are building something.”
“What?”
He hesitated.
“They think.”
I thought I had misheard him.
“What?”
“The buildings. The machines inside them. They think.”
This caused considerable amusement when he repeated it at the next meeting.
Even I laughed.
Buildings did not think.
Machines did not think.
My brother became angry.
“You haven't seen them.”
“Neither have you,” said Old Grey.
“I've seen the things that go into them. I've watched the strangers tending them. They feed them power. They bring them water. They keep making them bigger.”
“What do the machines think about?”
“I don't know.”
Old Grey made the little sound he used when someone was being foolish.
My brother turned on him.
“They are more intelligent than the strangers.”
That ended the discussion.
It was too absurd.
Nothing was more intelligent than the strangers.
We hated them, but we were not stupid.
Their intelligence was precisely the problem.
They could do things we could not even comprehend. They could reshape the ground. They could move water. They could travel enormous distances in a few hours. They communicated in ways invisible to us. They could kill without coming close enough to be touched.
Sometimes I wondered whether they even knew what they were doing to us.
This became a subject of fierce debate.
Of course they knew we existed. They could see us.
But perhaps, my brother suggested, they did not understand that we suffered.
I found this hard to believe.
“How could they not understand?”
“Maybe they think we're too simple.”
“We have families.”
“They may not know that.”
“We mourn our dead.”
“They may not know that either.”
“We talk to each other.”
“They can't understand us.”
I stared at him.
The thought was almost worse than deliberate cruelty.
One evening we stood together above the new complex.
It had grown so large that its lights turned the night sky pale.
A constant low vibration came from it. You could feel it through the ground.
My brother had grown thin. We all had.
“They call it progress,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“I heard them.”
We watched vehicles arrive and depart.
“What does it mean?”
He considered this.
“I think it means that they get more of what they want.”
“And us?”
He gave the little shrug which had lately become his answer to everything.
The following year was the hottest anyone remembered.
More water was diverted.
There were rumours that another complex would be built beyond the western boundary.
Nobody laughed at my brother anymore when he talked about the thinking machines.
By then we had accepted that they existed.
There was even a certain bitter satisfaction in it.
Perhaps, we told one another, the strangers had finally made something more intelligent than themselves.
Perhaps one day they would understand.
Perhaps one day these new minds would look at the people who had made them and decide that the land, the water and the energy could be put to better use.
Perhaps the people would protest.
They would explain that they had nowhere else to go.
That their homes had been there for generations.
That their children were suffering.
That the noise never stopped.
That the water was disappearing.
That nobody had asked their permission.
And perhaps the new minds would notice them.
Perhaps they would even feel sorry for them.
But progress was progress.
The thought comforted us.
It is not a noble emotion, I admit.
Still, on difficult nights, when the great building hums and the ground trembles beneath us, I sometimes imagine the future.
I imagine the humans standing outside the fences, watching the machines take what they need.
And I confess that my tail twitches with pleasure.
June 27, 2025
Just because a technology can be developed doesn’t mean it should be. Research at MIT has already shown that using ChatGPT to write essays makes our brains lazy and us more stupid.
Algorithms — the dumb cousin of generative AI — has been around for ages. Even these primitive AI’d have caused havocs and genocides (Rohingyas of Myanmar as one example) because they have been instructed to increase user engagement above all else. Thus the lies and untruths thrive.
In the words of Yuval Noah Harari, «most information is junk» and the truth is a rare and costly thing. We already have people’s opinion spreading like a stinking fart through all social media. AI will hallucinate answers and uneducated people will spread these lies.
Admittedly, I do use AI almost daily. Never for reviews or when posting anything on SoMe, but certainly to structure ideas and tidy up documents. It has its uses, but will it make the world a better place? Hell no. Just the energy it requires sticks a hole in that theory, completely disregarding the other numerous horrors that will follow.
The reason I think this is because of the damage the tech bros have already cause. They want to increase their billions at the detriment of everyone else. I thought Sam Altman might be more altruistic, but hell no. This book thoroughly reveals him to be as a conniving self serving bastard as the rest of them.
Algorithms — the dumb cousin of generative AI — has been around for ages. Even these primitive AI’d have caused havocs and genocides (Rohingyas of Myanmar as one example) because they have been instructed to increase user engagement above all else. Thus the lies and untruths thrive.
In the words of Yuval Noah Harari, «most information is junk» and the truth is a rare and costly thing. We already have people’s opinion spreading like a stinking fart through all social media. AI will hallucinate answers and uneducated people will spread these lies.
Admittedly, I do use AI almost daily. Never for reviews or when posting anything on SoMe, but certainly to structure ideas and tidy up documents. It has its uses, but will it make the world a better place? Hell no. Just the energy it requires sticks a hole in that theory, completely disregarding the other numerous horrors that will follow.
The reason I think this is because of the damage the tech bros have already cause. They want to increase their billions at the detriment of everyone else. I thought Sam Altman might be more altruistic, but hell no. This book thoroughly reveals him to be as a conniving self serving bastard as the rest of them.
June 13, 2025
Expertly reported investigation into the AI industry and its global goals and impacts, all channeled primarily through a portrait of OpenAI, which under Sam Altman's leadership began as a nonprofit with a vague mission statement about helping humanity but swiftly became a for-profit moral black hole that exploits workers, resources, and others' creativity. Hao makes an incredibly potent comparison between the tech industry and colonial powers, and from now on I don't think I'll ever see the OpenAIs, Googles, Amazons, etc. any other way.
She also embeds deeply with many of these companies' leaders, and unsurprisingly, these are the dumbest "smart" motherfuckers on the planet. A bunch of inhumane, paranoid, self-deluded mini-Musks who are being allowed to create an empire that perpetuates great harm -- not, to be clear, because AI is going to become sentient and take over the world; the product, uh, sucks actually -- even though they themselves have no clothes and no idea what the fuck they're doing.
There are uses of AI that could be a genuine benefit to humanity, and Hao details some of them, but instead everyone -- including, sadly, the company that published this book -- have bought into generative AI's empty bullshit.
It doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way.
She also embeds deeply with many of these companies' leaders, and unsurprisingly, these are the dumbest "smart" motherfuckers on the planet. A bunch of inhumane, paranoid, self-deluded mini-Musks who are being allowed to create an empire that perpetuates great harm -- not, to be clear, because AI is going to become sentient and take over the world; the product, uh, sucks actually -- even though they themselves have no clothes and no idea what the fuck they're doing.
There are uses of AI that could be a genuine benefit to humanity, and Hao details some of them, but instead everyone -- including, sadly, the company that published this book -- have bought into generative AI's empty bullshit.
It doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way.
June 1, 2026
it’s almost june, here’s what hot this summer 😎:
- sam altman’s future home (hell) 🥵🔥
- the teaaaa in here omg ☕️👀
- our planet after the data centers are done with it 🙊🤪
my blood feud with my office IT director is taking me places i never would’ve gone with a gun (a nonfiction book about the tech industry). but this was actually such a gripping read, highly recommend to anyone who wants to lie awake at night due to rage and anxiety. excellent recommendation, alyssa!! 4.5
- sam altman’s future home (hell) 🥵🔥
- the teaaaa in here omg ☕️👀
- our planet after the data centers are done with it 🙊🤪
my blood feud with my office IT director is taking me places i never would’ve gone with a gun (a nonfiction book about the tech industry). but this was actually such a gripping read, highly recommend to anyone who wants to lie awake at night due to rage and anxiety. excellent recommendation, alyssa!! 4.5
June 16, 2025
Such a disappointment! Still well documented list of events happening at OAI, written like one article piece that's journalistic. The whole personal life attacks were unwarranted IMO. She could still have made her point about Altman without dragging the family issues into this saga. In that sense too, Hao was exploitative! What's wrong with Americans!
July 7, 2025
AI/Open AI/AGI/ChapGPT.....these are things I hear about but haven't really delved into to understand or "use". This was quite an education. Since I don't know enough about the field to assess accuracy or "slant" or thoroughness, I can only attest to what seemed to be a pretty informative history of the evolution of certain companies and the major players associated with them.
As with all things "progress", there are potential benefits and costs involved. This book identifies many of those aspects: what AI might do to assist humanity, as well as the tremendous resources it requires which might ultimately be destructive to humanity; the potential replacement factors in terms of jobs and having a purpose in life; the extraction of resources from countries and areas who need to earn a living, while benefiting those well-off elsewhere. As with all power, there are skirmishes between major players to determine who has that power and how it will be used. The book also went into characteristics and issues associated with those who are well-known in the field (Altman, Musk, Thiel) and the division between those who see this as a "boom" and those who look more at the "doom" aspects.
These is much to ponder about the direction this is headed, with much uncertainty as to whether this will ultimately be of benefit to people or used for manipulative and self-serving needs of the few. I wish I had more faith in those leading the charge.
As with all things "progress", there are potential benefits and costs involved. This book identifies many of those aspects: what AI might do to assist humanity, as well as the tremendous resources it requires which might ultimately be destructive to humanity; the potential replacement factors in terms of jobs and having a purpose in life; the extraction of resources from countries and areas who need to earn a living, while benefiting those well-off elsewhere. As with all power, there are skirmishes between major players to determine who has that power and how it will be used. The book also went into characteristics and issues associated with those who are well-known in the field (Altman, Musk, Thiel) and the division between those who see this as a "boom" and those who look more at the "doom" aspects.
These is much to ponder about the direction this is headed, with much uncertainty as to whether this will ultimately be of benefit to people or used for manipulative and self-serving needs of the few. I wish I had more faith in those leading the charge.
November 9, 2025
Empire of AI is ambitious, spirited, consequently messy and all over the place. I think OpenAI is already overhyped and overvalued (news this week claiming it to be too big to fail, hope USGOV doesn't tend to bail it out), anyhow Sam Altman would probably end up like Sam Bankman, so no fan of sama drama but Hao's chronicles were too long and disorderly and ironically felt like generated by earlier versions of chatGPT. I really wished she edited this better and made it a definitive guide as was advertised.
March 13, 2026
Really good and readable book on apparently-not-so-OpenAI. It does a good job asking the question of what damage we're doing (on several fronts) to make this new technology viable, but through the lens of a specific person and organization.
May 28, 2025
A must-read for the AI era that's an interesting look into OpenAI -- one of the most defining companies of our time -- but so much more. This is a deeply researched sociological exploration of the power dynamics of the AI industry, its ethics, environmental impact, and the dual possibilities of AI as either an equalizer, or a tool to perpetuate systemic inequality, depending on how the coming years play out. I highly recommend for anyone working in, or simply interested in, AI and its impacts on society.
A prescient quote from the epilogue: "The critiques that I lay out in this book of OpenAI's and Silicon Valley's broader vision are not by any means meant to dismiss AI in its entirety. What I reject is the dangerous notion that broad benefit from AI can only be derived from -- indeed, will ever emerge from -- a vision for the technology that requires the complete capitulation of our privacy, our agency, and our worth, including the value of our labor and art, toward an ultimately imperial centralization project."
A prescient quote from the epilogue: "The critiques that I lay out in this book of OpenAI's and Silicon Valley's broader vision are not by any means meant to dismiss AI in its entirety. What I reject is the dangerous notion that broad benefit from AI can only be derived from -- indeed, will ever emerge from -- a vision for the technology that requires the complete capitulation of our privacy, our agency, and our worth, including the value of our labor and art, toward an ultimately imperial centralization project."
March 10, 2026
english major daughter of bay area tech parents finally reads something ab the industry moment... first non fiction in ages and first audiobook ever & well worth my time! the epilogue's contrast of task-focused, highly topical applications of AI as opposed to the scalescalescale at any cost business models of openai, anthropic, etc. successfully underlined hao's central arg. her empire metaphor is so apt and highly effective, and her reporting from chile, kenya, other countries in the global south exploited by the tech world was probably the most crucial, damning part of the book. sam altman and fellow freakazoids can truly go rot in hell!!!
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September 27, 2025Learnt my GPUs from my AGIs
![Profile Image for laurel [the suspected bibliophile].](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1645808644i/7494844._UX200_CR0,6,200,200_.jpg)
August 29, 2026
Burn capitalist genAI to the fucking ground.
While Hao makes the point—at the end of the book—that genAI *can* be done ethically and has been done ethically (in small scale forms), ultimately the way many current LLMs and other forms of genAI are not and will never be ethical, environmentally safe, or good in any way, shape or form.
I read this the same week a federal judge decided that perverts creating CSAM with AI is not actually CSAM and that so long as they don't distribute it to others, it's fine to keep in the privacy of their own home. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. LIKE, WHERE THE TELL DOES THIS GUY THINK THAT THE TRAINING DATA CAME FROM?
Hao notes, in great detail, with lots of evidence, how the creation and distribution of genAI has been built not just by the genius of tech bros (as the various genAI corporations' media teams proudly proclaim), but through a system of exploited labor (using underpaid gig labor in exploited global south countries), stolen art and writing (the scraping of the internet, including millions of copyrighted books, movies, podcasts, videos, artwork, etc), and extractionism (water and land use destroying fragile ecosystems and damaging marginalized communities).
Anywho, OpenAI is a fucking cesspit, Sam Altman is a horrible human being, Elon Musk can rot in a shallow grave, and the "move fast and break things" model of operating is unsustainable and incredibly harmful.
While Hao makes the point—at the end of the book—that genAI *can* be done ethically and has been done ethically (in small scale forms), ultimately the way many current LLMs and other forms of genAI are not and will never be ethical, environmentally safe, or good in any way, shape or form.
I read this the same week a federal judge decided that perverts creating CSAM with AI is not actually CSAM and that so long as they don't distribute it to others, it's fine to keep in the privacy of their own home. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. LIKE, WHERE THE TELL DOES THIS GUY THINK THAT THE TRAINING DATA CAME FROM?
Hao notes, in great detail, with lots of evidence, how the creation and distribution of genAI has been built not just by the genius of tech bros (as the various genAI corporations' media teams proudly proclaim), but through a system of exploited labor (using underpaid gig labor in exploited global south countries), stolen art and writing (the scraping of the internet, including millions of copyrighted books, movies, podcasts, videos, artwork, etc), and extractionism (water and land use destroying fragile ecosystems and damaging marginalized communities).
Anywho, OpenAI is a fucking cesspit, Sam Altman is a horrible human being, Elon Musk can rot in a shallow grave, and the "move fast and break things" model of operating is unsustainable and incredibly harmful.
February 25, 2026
3.8?? This was incredibly thorough and well researched and while the author had some clear points to make, they were largely illustrated by her research and not just her random opinions, which I appreciate.
That said, I struggled largely with the format and structure of said research - certain sections were tough to get through and there were a lot of anecdotes that I'm not sure added anything other than three new names to remember.
Overall would recommend as it sheds light on the many dimensions of how we're generally f'd.
That said, I struggled largely with the format and structure of said research - certain sections were tough to get through and there were a lot of anecdotes that I'm not sure added anything other than three new names to remember.
Overall would recommend as it sheds light on the many dimensions of how we're generally f'd.
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