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Mint
24-07-2025
- Mint
Sam Altman is a visionary with a trustworthiness problem
The Optimist. By Keach Hagey. W.W. Norton; 384 pages; $31.99 and £25 Empire of AI. By Karen Hao. Penguin Press; 496 pages; $32 and £25 IN GREEK MYTHology Prometheus stole fire from the gods and brought it to Earth. He paid for that by being bound for eternity to a rock face, where an eagle tormented him daily by pecking at his liver. Such was the price of humanity's first great technology. In the 21st century the story of Sam Altman, the co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, has a Promethean ring to it, too. He spearheaded the creation of ChatGPT, which was launched in late 2022, stunning the world: suddenly the revolutionary capabilities and risks of generative artificial intelligence (AI) were unleashed. A year later the capricious gods—that is to say, OpenAI's non-profit board—sought to banish him. Unlike Prometheus, however, Mr Altman emerged unscathed. This story is the subject of two excellent new books. They explore the murky mix of missionary zeal, rivalry and mistrust at OpenAI in the run-up to the birth of ChatGPT. The tensions are even more apparent in the chaos leading up to the attempt to fire Mr Altman during the abortive boardroom coup in November 2023. It is testimony to the skill of the authors, who are journalists, that they have produced deeply researched, gripping accounts, both published on May 20th, almost exactly a year and a half after that event. Better still, they tell the story in different ways. Keach Hagey's 'The Optimist" is what could be called the authorised version. She had access to Mr Altman and many of the main characters in his story, including his family and friends. His personality is vivid and complicated enough that her story never flags. It is no hagiography. Karen Hao got no such access for 'Empire of AI". OpenAI kept her at arm's length, which gives her account more bite. Both books reveal disturbing traits about Mr Altman, OpenAI and the culture of Silicon Valley that are useful to bear in mind amid the hype about generative AI. Mr Altman is a beguiling character. As Ms Hagey says, the first things you notice about him are his slight stature and the intensity of his gaze, 'as though he is speaking to the most important person in the world". Brought up in the American Midwest, from a young age he was a technology whizz who was surprisingly witty. He proved a natural crusader: at 17 he shocked a school assembly by revealing his homosexuality in order to promote gay rights. Throughout his career, he has combined an ambition to create world-changing technologies with a gift for storytelling that helps him raise large sums of money to fund his dreams. He started with a location-tracking phone app called Loopt. Since then, his large bets have included a cryptocurrency backed by eye scans to certify digital identity in a world of AI; life extension through cellular-rejuvenation technology; nuclear fusion; and, of course, the quest for superintelligence. Some liken his abilities to Steve Jobs's 'reality distortion field"—the Apple co-founder could make people believe in what they thought was impossible. But unlike Jobs, who was often abrasive, Mr Altman is a sensitive listener who knows how to frame what he offers in ways that people find alluring. From early on, his people skills have attracted powerful mentors. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator (YC), a startup incubator, said of Mr Altman: 'You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he'd be king." Indeed Mr Graham and his partner, Jessica Livingston, handed the reins of YC to Mr Altman within a few years, elevating him at the age of 28 to a position of near-unrivalled power in the Silicon Valley startup scene. Playing with fire Even then, there were misgivings about his candour. 'If Sam smiles, it's super deliberate," a former YC founder tells Ms Hao. 'Sam has smiled uncontrollably only once, when [Mr Graham] told him to take over YC." At Loopt, which he sold for $43m in 2012, his colleagues twice sought to convince the board to sack him as CEO because, as Ms Hagey says, he pursued his own ideas without informing them. Their concerns about his trustworthiness are recounted in both books—even if, in the end, his financial backers remained loyal. Likewise, at YC, Mr Graham and Ms Livingston grew frustrated with Mr Altman's moonlighting at OpenAI, which he started with Elon Musk and others in 2015, while still running YC. Ms Livingston fired him but, as Ms Hagey recounts, he left chaos in his wake. Not only was he overseen by a non-functioning board, he had also used YC equity to help lure people to OpenAI. She says some YC partners saw a potential conflict of interest, 'or at least an unseemly leveraging of the YC brand for Altman's personal projects". These details are important. Both accounts suggest that his ambition, speed and silver-tongued way of telling people only what they want to hear have come close to unravelling OpenAI. Paradoxically, some of these same traits helped OpenAI amass the huge amounts of money and computational power, not to mention the troves of data scraped from the internet to feed its models, that helped give the firm the lead in generative AI. On one occasion, known as 'the divorce", he so alienated some of OpenAI's researchers focused on safety that they left the company and founded one of its main rivals, Anthropic, in 2021. On another, known as 'the blip", he was sensationally fired after his top lieutenants and the board lost trust in him because, as both books say, he told them conflicting stories and failed to give them straight answers about his and OpenAI's investment activities. Yet he returned triumphantly a few days later when they realised that the company might collapse without him. Underpinning both these episodes, and running through both books, is the ideological struggle between those who favour speed over safety when rolling out generative AI. OpenAI has suffered heavily from an internecine rift between 'doomers" and 'boomers". Many of the doomers are part of the effective-altruism (EA) movement, a philanthropic philosophy aimed at finding the most potent way to help others, which took a keen interest in the possibly catastrophic risks of AI. The boomers, or 'effective accelerationists", are more concerned that if America does not win the AI race, China will. In reality, as Ms Hao points out, they are two sides of the same coin. Each is striving to push the boundaries of machine superintelligence as far as is safe or possible—even if one warns of 'fire and brimstone" and the other offers 'visions of heaven". Equally interesting are the rivalries in a field full of quasi-geniuses and the technological leaps they perform to keep ahead of each other. Both books chronicle the falling-out between Mr Musk and Mr Altman, which is vividly catalogued as part of a lawsuit Mr Musk has filed against OpenAI, its boss, and Microsoft, the biggest investor in OpenAI's for-profit entity. Throughout, the two books diverge in ways that underscore the question at the heart of their common story: does the end, the quest for superintelligent AI, justify the means? Ms Hagey appears to think so. She explains away some of Mr Altman's behaviour as aversion to conflict and a 'move fast and break things" mindset common in Silicon Valley. Ms Hao, meanwhile, accuses OpenAI of betraying its mission. She is critical not only of Mr Altman, but of the heads of rival firms, who she insists are in the same power struggle. She says generative-AI models are 'monstrosities", consuming too much data, power and natural resources. She goes too far, however, in likening OpenAi and other labs to colonial empires. But taking the evidence from both books, her concerns about Mr Altman seem valid. In any organisation a CEO who does not seem fully trustworthy is a problem. This is particularly so at the helm of a firm like OpenAI, which is building potentially Promethean technologies. For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter
Observer
04-07-2025
- Business
- Observer
Karen explores AI's role in modern imperialism
When journalist Karen Hao first profiled OpenAI in 2020, it was a little-known startup. Five years and one very popular chatbot later, the company has transformed into a dominant force in the fast-expanding AI sector — one Hao likens to a 'modern-day colonial world order' in her new book, 'Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI'. Hao tells that this isn't a comparison she made lightly. Drawing on years of reporting in Silicon Valley and further afield to countries where generative AI's impact is perhaps most acutely felt, she makes the case that, like empires of old, AI firms are building their wealth off of resource extraction and labour exploitation. This critique stands in stark contrast to the vision promoted by industry leaders like Altman, who portray AI as a tool for human advancement — from boosting productivity to improving healthcare. Empires, Hao contends, cloaked their conquests in the language of progress too. A handout image of the book cover for 'Empire of AI' by Hong Kong-based American journalist and author Karen Hao Your work has culminated in your new book 'Empire of AI'. What story were you hoping to tell? Once I started covering AI, I realised that it was a microcosm of all of the things that I wanted to explore: how technology affects society, how people interface with it, the incentives (and) misaligned incentives within Silicon Valley. I was very lucky in getting to observe AI and also OpenAI before everyone had their ChatGPT moment; and I wanted to add more context to that moment that everyone experienced and show them this technology comes from a specific place. It comes from a specific group of people and to understand its trajectory and how it's going to impact us in the future. How did Netflix drama 'The Crown' it influence your storytelling approach? The title 'Empire of AI' refers to OpenAI and this argument that (AI represents) a new form of empire and the reason I make this argument is because there are many features of empires of old that empires of AI now check off. They lay claim to resources that are not their own, including the data of millions and billions of people who put their data online, without actually understanding that it could be taken to be trained for AI models. They exploit a lot of labour around the world — meaning they contract workers who they pay very little to do their data annotation and content moderation for these AI models. And they do it under the civilising mission, this idea that they're bringing benefit to all of humanity. It took me a really long time to figure out how to structure a book that goes back and forth between all these different communities and characters and contexts. I ended up thinking a lot about 'The Crown' because every episode, no matter who it's about, is ultimately profiling this global system of power. Karen Hao, the Hong Kong-based American journalist Can you share an example that highlights the real-world consequences of its rise? One of the things that people don't really realise is that AI is not magic and it actually requires an extremely large amount of human labour and human judgment to create these technologies. These AI companies will go to Global South countries to contract workers for very low wages where they will either annotate data that needs to go into training these training models or they will perform content moderation or they will converse with the models and then upvote and downvote their answers and slowly teach them into saying more helpful things. How do you see the industry's growth balancing with sustainability efforts? These data centres and supercomputers, the size that we're talking about is something that has become unfathomable to the average person. There are data centres that are being built that will be 1,000 to 2,000 megawatts, which is around one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half times the energy demand of San Francisco. OpenAI has even drafted plans where they were talking about building supercomputers that would be 5,000 megawatts, which would be the average demand of the entire city of New York City. How has your perspective on AI changed, if at all? Writing this book made me even more concerned because I realised the extent to which these companies have a controlling influence over everything now. Before I was worried about the labour exploitation, the environmental impacts, the impact on the job market. But through the reporting of the book, I realised the horizontal concern that cuts across all this is if we return to an age of empire, we no longer have democracy. Because in a world where people no longer have agency and ownership over their data, their land, their energy, their water, they no longer feel like they can self-determine their future. — Reuters
Toronto Star
02-07-2025
- Business
- Toronto Star
Toronto Star bestsellers: A new book about the ‘ominous age' of AI joins the non-fiction list
Karen Hao's bestseller 'Empire of AI' began with her coverage of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Michael Dwyer/The Associated Press file photo
Hindustan Times
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Book Box: How to cope with AI anxiety
Dear Reader, Empire of AI ticks all the boxes. These days, I see AI writing everywhere—on LinkedIn, in text messages from colleagues, and even in substack newsletters. There's something about these polished pieces of prose, glib and formulaic, with their idiosyncratic sentence structures and excessive dashes, that end up depressing me. Many of my writer friends won't touch AI. 'We can write just fine without it,' they say. But I can't stay away. I face my AI anxiety by finding out what this new beast is. As a teacher of management, and as someone who has pivoted careers three times already, I feel compelled to keep up with the times. AI making all writers redundant I sign up for 'Prompt Engineering 101 for Journalists' conducted by the non-profit Knight Centre. It teaches me how to prompt AI to 'red-team' my writing—to critique flaws rather than default to dishing out praise. And to watch out for AI 'hallucinations' like made-up names of books and fake quotations falsely attributed to real people. I stay conflicted: is it okay to use large language models that ride on the backs of writers and artists, that have learned by scraping creative works with no regard for privacy or copyright? And what about the environmental toll—the depredations on water and energy that the data centres inflict, especially in developing countries? I look for my answers in books about AI. Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World is a 2024 book by Parmy Olson that won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year. It takes me close to AI stars like Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dennis Hassabis of DeepMind, as well as to the dangers of decision-making being left to a tiny elite. But it leaves me wanting more. A friend recommends The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, a memoir by Chinese-American scientist Dr. Fei-Fei Li. It begins with an exciting chapter, with Fei-Fei traveling from her West Coast Google office to Washington, D.C., to testify to a US Senate committee on the direction of AI research. For many pages I am enraptured, reading Fei-Fei's family history, how she helped her parents run their dry cleaning store while studying at Princeton and then working at Stanford. Li has been a pioneer in AI image recognition with her ImageNet project, and this makes for fascinating reading. The book veers between scientific excitement, and apprehension at where AI research is going, and confirms my unease over the economic and existential implications of this new technology. Then I discover Empire of AI by Karen Hao. From the very first page, I am highlighting lines, drawn in by Hao's historical analysis of AI research over the years, everything from the 'AI winter' to the dispute between two schools of AI research—the symbolists and the connectionists. Empire of AI ticks all the boxes. It is rich in history and human detail, demystifying core concepts like deep learning and neural networks. Hao gives us the stars like Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman—and also the workers, the data labelers and content moderators like Mophat Okinyi, Oskarina Fuentes Anaya, and shows the havoc that AI jobs have brought to their lives, as they are forced to deal with explicit sexual content and violent images and to perform AI training tasks for a pittance. For me, the most moving part is the story of Sam Altman's sister Annie Altman, who turned to sex work, having suffered huge health challenges and trapped in severe financial duress, against Sam's lifestyle featuring multimillion-dollar homes and luxury cars. 'Annie's story also complicates the grand narrative that Sam and other OpenAI executives have painted of AI ushering in a world of abundance. Altman has said that he expects AI to end poverty... And yet, against the reality of the lives of the workers in Kenya, activists in Chile, and Altman's own sister's experience bearing the brunt of all of these problems, those dreams ring hollow', says Hao. I put aside Empire of AI to go back to my day. I know it's ironic and it feels very meta, but after writing this, I ask Deepseek to design a brief depicting a writer dealing with the good and bad sides of AI, and then I use that output to ask Gemini to design the illustrations for me. AI, the perfect productivity tool ? That evening as I walk down towards the market to buy a AI-recommended geyser, I find myself grateful for Karen Hao's book. Because if AI's future is being written by the Altmans and the Musks of the world, excluding large sections of the world, there are things we can do to participate. Reading books like Hao's pushes us to pay attention—to the workers behind the algorithms, to the biases in the data, to the futures we're building one query at a time. Books like these arm us to fight back - to push for policy changes, demand transparency in training data, and support ethical AI movements. So yes, I will use AI. But I'll also keep reading and buying subscriptions to real writers and real news outlets, because the best defence against a dystopian future is to dream of a better one, and then to fight for it. What about you, dear Reader? Do you find AI more anxiety-inducing or enabling? Or a complex mix of both? And can you suggest any other such books on AI that we can add to this vital reading list? (Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya's Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at sonyasbookbox@
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Science Fiction 'Hugely Shapes OpenAI's Imagination And Where They're Going,' Author Karen Hao Says
OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman is 'deeply obsessed' with the 2013 film Her, according to technology journalist Karen Hao. 'Science fiction hugely shapes OpenAI's imagination and where they're going,' Hao said during a discussion Tuesday of her bestselling new book, Empire of AI, hosted by the Pulitzer Center in New York. More from Deadline Luca Guadagnino Eyes 'Artificial' At Amazon MGM As Next Movie With Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro And 'Anora' Actor Yura Borisov Circling Sky Boss Dana Strong Raises Artificial Intelligence Copyright Concerns: "I Can't Fathom How A Small Producer Keeps Up" Tastes Great, Less Filling? Report On Meta Plan For Cheaper, Fully AI-Made Ads Boosts Tech Giant's Stock As Media Agency Shares Slump Altman 'has evoked throughout OpenAI's history his idea that Her is the thing that OpenAI should building,' the author said of the film directed by Spike Jonze and starring Joaquin Phoenix and the voice of Scarlett Johansson. 'Artificial generative intelligence doesn't have a definition, and so they actually use pop culture as the way to describe and put a shape to the nebulous thing that they're trying to achieve.' An 'under-talked-about' current in the world of AI, Hao said, is the 'deep, intertwined relationship between science fiction and pop culture portrayals of these things and, ultimately, the technologies that we get. Because a lot of these people are sci-fi nerds and they want these things, and then it shapes their beliefs, their ideas of what they want to do.' Hao was interviewed by Marina Walker Guevara, the executive editor at the Pulitzer Center who previously oversaw the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigative journalism projects. Empire of AI, which was published two weeks ago, is one of two new books to profile Altman, along with Keach Hagey's The Optimist. Hao, by her own description, is delivering a 'critique' of the arms race that AI has become. Much of her talk focused on her reporting around the world documenting the harmful effects of AI, including communities whose water supply has been compromised by data center construction. Low-paid workers in the global south, she writes, must sift through reams of objectionable content in order to train large-language models. Her book also traces the development of OpenAI, which began as a well-intentioned non-profit co-founded by Elon Musk before turning into a commercial entity worth billions of dollars and funded by Microsoft. A central question during the discussion was whether there are ways to push back against the immense wealth and dominance of Silicon Valley. 'Every community that I spoke to, regardless of that there were artists having their intellectual property taken or water activists who were having the fresh water taken, they were all saying the same exact thing. When they encounter the empire, they feel this incredible loss of agency, a profound loss of the agency to self-determine their people,' Hao said. If that loss is permitted, she argued, 'democracy cannot survive, because democracy is based on the fact that people feel that agency and they' willing to go to the booth to vote, because they know that it will matter. And so the theme that I find hopeful is that there are so many movements that I encountered around the world that are now trying to reclaim that the agency.' She cited a protest in Chile, where activists managed to hold tech companies to account for the way their AI projects were harming the water supply. 'If we we allow this to happen 100,000-times-fold, if we really amplify and support this work, that is how we can get this trajectory of air development to turn from a more imperial approach, and top-down, 'we just say whatever we want and it goes' to a more broad-based, democratically beneficial version of AI,' Hao said. Best of Deadline 2025 TV Series Renewals: Photo Gallery 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More Everything We Know About 'Nobody Wants This' Season 2 So Far
