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

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)

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I thought it was a good overview of the personalities involved. I personally would've preferred a bit more depth and history on the AI research space over the past 50 years of prior AI booms and crashes, but appreciate it was in part pulling together a lot of prior reporting on more recent events.