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Empire of AI

Inside the reckless race for total domination

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Empire of AI

By: Karen Hao
Narrated by: Karen Hao
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About this listen

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

 Business Ethics Computer Science Environment History & Culture Machine Theory & Artificial Intelligence Science Technology & Society Workplace & Organisational Behaviour

Critic Reviews

A gripping new account of the battle for AI supremacy… tense and absorbing (Emine Saner)
A veteran AI reporter, Hao’s more detailed account of OpenAI’s progress... doesn't pull any punches (Richard Waters)
Excellent and deeply reported (Tim Wu)
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)
Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us
Deeply researched, gripping
Hao pulls no punches in describing the building of one of the biggest names in generative AI, focusing her account on the dysfunctional, combative leadership approach of co-founder Sam Altman. She details how his apocalyptic predictions and messianic rhetoric attracted devoted disciples to his cause (Andrew Hill)
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
An epic exposé that pulls back the curtain on the egos and uneasy compromises behind the rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's full of dark details, some of them bordering on absurd, that shows how much of the AI boom runs on secrecy and is driven by questionable ideologies. This book serves as a warning about the price we all pay when AI builders who dreamed of utopia got swept up in a race to build empires instead (Parmy Olson, Bloomberg columnist and author of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World )
Our lives are about to be remade by artificial intelligence—or to be more accurate, by a few companies run by a few very self-confident people. If you ever wondered whether all of this is inevitable, whether to believe all the promises of tech luminaries, whether we could save a little bit of our democracy in the age of AI, then read this book! (Daron Acemoglu, recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences)
All stars
Most relevant
This is an excellent and incredibly in depth story of the rise of AI (AGI) and the people involved. It’s a warts and all exposure that doesn’t hold back. Individuals thought of as heroes are flawed, some unforgivably so. Certain practices such as content moderation are horrendous, even inhumane. There is much debate about AI: the good vs evil; liberator vs destructor. Both options are laid out leaving the reader to decide. Great work Karen, highly recommended.

Fascinating and disturbing

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It was produced like a chronicle. Very easy to follow but scary. It displayed the poor quality of project management in use by the US government.

The bad direction our world is going.

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Hao presents a comprehensive narration and analysis of the rise of the AI hype engine and draws compelling comparisons to the mechanics of colonial empires. The book is framed around OpenAI in particular but it seems safe to conclude that much of the imperialist mindset described herein is applicable to Silicon Valley and American big tech exceptionalism as a whole.
The book challenges any attentive reader/listener to question the prevailing narrative that big tech is the way it is because it must be, and provided several stories of resistance and community-centric subversions that act as counterexamples to the imperialist narrative.
It was particularly disturbing to read about prominent AI figures comparing their work to the Manhattan Project with none of the self reflection. To these Effective Altruists a mystical and elusive notion of Artificial General Intelligence is as good a justification of any moral trespass as the existential threat of a nuclear WW2 Germany was to the scientists that developed the atom bomb. It is a twisted philosophy that manages to justify imperialism as just another requirement in humanity’s inevitable progress.

Fascinating insight into modern Empire

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Worth listening to as it’s all about one of the current big issues in the known universe - but the story itself is very rapidly going out a date (as at mid 2025). If you play it at 1.5 speed or higher, you get the true aural effect of the left-leaning, rather woke approach the author takes to the whole of (USA based) recent AI history. But she undoubtedly raises and explores serious issues about some powerful / flawed / smart people.

Play it at 1.5 + speed

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Loved the book - recommend it to everyone interested in A.I.

Highlights pain caused by AI and also the costs - which is not discussed in the broad discourse.

Great book to provide a real look in to A.I. and its development and its limitations.

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