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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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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

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)

With devastating revelations, deep insider research, and delightful page-turning delivery, Karen Hao shows us why she is one of the foremost tech journalists covering AI. From data centers in Chile to data workers in Kenya, Empire of AI reveals the hidden human and environmental costs behind AI products that have triggered a race for land, water, and cheap labor to cement power in the hands of a few. Empire of AI is the warning we need—just as more open and less energy-intensive alternatives reveal that a different AI future is possible and achievable (Dr. Joy Buolamwini, author of Unmasking AI )
In her brilliant book, Empire of AI, Karen Hao chronicles the mania surrounding artificial intelligence and OpenAI. With a cast of scientists, scammers, and scoundrels, Empire of AI documents the hype campaign that caused the world to fall in love with a technology whose immediate harms are legion and benefits remain unproved. When litigation comes, this book may find a second life as Exhibit A for the plaintiffs (Roger McNamee, author of Zucked )
Empire of AI is a heroic work. Karen Hao braved many obstacles with gritty determination as she traveled the yellow brick road to the Oz of the storied corporation OpenAI to bring us this work of essential public education. Hao is a gifted journalist and a deep thinker who reveals the historical significance and societal consequences of Silicon Valley’s AI spectacle, even as she meticulously documents a company and its leader hellbent on getting there first with no idea where they are going. If you think the digital future is safe in the hands of brilliant scientists, smart investors, and earnest political leaders, read this book and think again (Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism )
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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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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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