An Instant New York Times Bestseller “Excellent and deeply reported.” —Tim Wu The New York
Times “Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and
ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us.” — Vulture “Hao’s
reporting inside OpenAI is exceptional and she’s persuasive in her argument that the public
should focus less on A.I.’s putative ‘sentience’ and more on its implications for labor and the
environment.” —Benjamin Wallace-Wells New Yorker From a brilliant longtime AI insider with
intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning an eye-opening account
of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history reshaping the planet in real time from
the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy When AI expert and investigative
journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019 she thought they were the good guys.
Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission the organization was meant
its leader Sam Altman told us to act as a check against more purely mercantile and
potentially dangerous forces. What could go wrong? Over time Hao began to wrestle ever more
deeply with that question. Increasingly she realized that the core truth of this massively
disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of
resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive
large language models the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale the humans
“cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South and a truly alarming
spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a
new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter
the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough how would OpenAI
resist such temptations? Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions OpenAI is
setting a breakneck pace chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human
history—toward what end not even they can define. All this time Hao has maintained her deep
sourcing within the company and the industry and so she was in intimate contact with the story
that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The
behind-the-scenes story of what happened told here in full for the first time is revelatory
of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a
single company however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI
are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the
ideology to cloak itself no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime as Hao shows
through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world the enormous wheels of extraction
grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers Kenyan data laborers and
Chilean water activists Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to
date alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view
from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering
happens Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.
