Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

When longtime AI expert 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 mercantile forces. What could go wrong?

Over time, first for the MIT Technology Review, then the Wall Street Journal, and now for the Atlantic, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that 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 and the processing capacity to compile and drive these massive large language model data sets, 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. Somewhere near you, a server farm is being built. 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 of this great game. How would Sam Altman and OpenAI resist such Faustian temptations?

Spoiler alert: they 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. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within OpenAI and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact last year with the story that shocked the entire tech industry--Altman's sudden firing by the OpenAI board just as he seemed at the top of the world, and then the board's ignominious retreat and Altman's triumphant return. The true story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is one of the great tales of corporate hubris and dysfunction for the highest of stakes. But this isn't just a tale of a single company and its team, however fascinating they are. The g forces pressing down on this crew are deforming the judgement 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 also shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction at scale grind on. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down on the darkling plain where the real suffering happens at impact, Empire of AI is the book we need to pierce the veil and bring the stakes into sharp focus.