Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“This book is not a corporate book. While it tells the inside story of OpenAI, that story is meant to be a prism through which to see far beyond this one company. It is a profile of a scientific ambition turned into an aggressive ideological, money-fueled quest; an examination of its multifaceted and expansive footprint; a meditation on power.”

In Empire of AI, Hao uses OpenAI as a paradigmatic example of the Silicon Valley’s harmful approach to AI development. She argues that it is not “a corporate book,” by which she means a hagiographic or uncritical history of a tech corporation. She is clear that Empire of AI is a work of critique whose scope extends beyond the corporation at its center.

“Musk and Altman, who had until then both taken more hands-off approaches as cochairmen, each tried to install himself as CEO. Altman won out. Musk left the organization in early 2018 and took his money with him. In hindsight, the rift was the first major sign that OpenAI was not in fact an altruistic project but rather one of ego.”

Hao focuses on the personalities involved in the creation of OpenAI and its products, most notably Altman, Musk, and cofounders Brockman and Sutskever. In this quote, she signals that she uses their personalities and conflicts as a microcosm of the larger ethical issues of AI development.

“Under the hood, generative AI models are monstrosities, built from consuming previously unfathomable amounts of data, labor, computing power, and natural resources […] Over the years, I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires.”

Hao presents Research-Driven AI Expansion as Neocolonialism. She uses the term “empire” as a “metaphor” for the imperial processes required to build generative AI models. The use of the first-person pronoun “I” highlights that this analysis is in part a subjective critique.