Heidi’s Reviews > Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI > Status Update

oooohhhhh now - finally - it’s getting good. Chapter 16 is where we hear about actual, specific, devious and dirty lies. The Prologue - and all the chapters up til now - had me thinking Hao was going to stay vague where we knew it was actually juicy and continue to feed us obnoxious levels of detail where it wasn’t.

Enough about Annie already. Just why. I guess the point is, it’s potential proof Sam is heartless. But like why am I reading about ovarian cysts in a book about AI.

For anyone with Spotify who isn’t fascinated enough by AI lore to listen to 14+ hours, but still interested in how early gpt versions were trained, I’d recommend chapter 5 of Empire. Although when I tried to relay “the really good parts” to my 17yo while we were getting manicures today, she gave me that look that says, nobody cares. 🙄

I’m enjoying this, although I got sidetracked by the Claude Mythos System Card that dropped 4/7. It’s full of lore and reads like a tech bro gossip magazine. Lots of “who said what to whom.” A Grok-Opera, so to speak. 😆 Mira Murati comes across as a badass, and I didn't realize how central Shivon Zilis was. I’ve heard the names Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman enough times they’re etched in my brain.