Empire of AI
- Author Karen Hao
- Narrator Karen Hao
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Publish Date 20 May 2025
- Run Time 17 hours and 50 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Artificial intelligence, Business ethics and social responsibility, Digital and information technologies: social and ethical aspects, Environmental science, engineering and technology, Ethical issues: scientific, technological and medical developments, Impact of science and technology on society, Popular science.
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What to expect
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 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 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
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