Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
A New York Times Notable Book • Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction • A New York Times Bestseller • Named a Best Book of the Year by Smithsonian, Scientific American, and Elle • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, NYPL Helen Bernstein Award, Whiting Award, Nautilus Book Award, and Porchlight Business Book Award
“A bestselling page-turner that has made waves not just in Silicon Valley but around the world . . . With Empire of AI, Hao is fundamentally shaping many people’s perceptions and understanding of the company at the center of the AI revolution.” —TIME Magazine, “TIME100 AI 2025”
“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
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 the tech arms race in history that is reshaping the planet in real time
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined, the organization was meant to act as a check against more purely mercantile forces. What could go wrong?
Over time, Hao wrestled with that question. Increasingly, she realized that this disruptive sector’s vision of success requires an 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. We have entered a new age of empire where only a handful of globally scaled companies can enter the field of play.
Armed with billions, pushing on trillions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained deep sourcing within the company and the industry, keeping in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes of what happened is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company. As Hao shows through intrepid global reporting, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. An astonishing eyewitness view from both the command capsule of the new economy and where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.
“A bestselling page-turner that has made waves not just in Silicon Valley but around the world . . . With Empire of AI, Hao is fundamentally shaping many people’s perceptions and understanding of the company at the center of the AI revolution.” —TIME Magazine, “TIME100 AI 2025”
“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
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 the tech arms race in history that is reshaping the planet in real time
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined, the organization was meant to act as a check against more purely mercantile forces. What could go wrong?
Over time, Hao wrestled with that question. Increasingly, she realized that this disruptive sector’s vision of success requires an 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. We have entered a new age of empire where only a handful of globally scaled companies can enter the field of play.
Armed with billions, pushing on trillions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained deep sourcing within the company and the industry, keeping in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes of what happened is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company. As Hao shows through intrepid global reporting, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. An astonishing eyewitness view from both the command capsule of the new economy and where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.
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Community Reviews
Karen Hao’s “Empire of AI” is the seminal book and exegesis on the Artificial Intelligence arms race at this critical juncture in human history. Hao goes into painstaking detail and covers a large footprint that comes together into one all-encompassing tome; the examinations contained within not only unpack the technological aspects of this movement but also the human experiences and consequences.
Karen Hao deserves every drop of praise and more for the efforts she put into this book. Her penchant for accuracy in research and fact-finding shows in every page and sentence. Her writing style pulls you in with its intimate and documentary-esque tone. What comes across clearest is that we have some of the smartest minds in the world building a technology that can have real, meaningful outcomes for humanity, but the greed and avarice funding this race will likely push the technology to more destructive applications.
To be clear, this is not an anti-AI book. It is a word of caution on the breakneck speed and win at all costs approach being taken to achieve in the AI race. The book also cautions that while AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is the holy grail of this race, its definition is fraught with issues that highlight the God complex of the leaders in this industry. Hao finishes with a glimmer of hope on the alternative pragmatic approach of expert models can stave off the real-world human and ecological costs it is already extracting.
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