Empire of AI

by Karen Hao

ISBN: 9780241678923

Published: 2025-07-24

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...