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

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a vaguely defined term that broadly refers to machine learning models. Dartmouth professor John McCarthy coined the term in 1956 to describe “the pursuit of machines capable of automatic behavior” (89). Hao critiques the term AI as a “marketing tool” that encourages anthropomorphizing and obscures how these machine systems actually work.

An AI agent an AI model capable of semi-autonomous behavior. AI agents represent the frontier of AI technology. Though they operate semi-autonomously, they must be provided with highly specific goals and the tools to achieve them—including web searches, external datasets, and other AI agents optimized for related subtasks. If not carefully managed, AI agents in business and institutional settings can raise significant security and privacy concerns.

AGI is a term that broadly refers to a theoretical artificial intelligence model that can “digitally replicat[e] true human-level intelligence” (47). However, there is no consensus as to what “intelligence” means, and the meaning of AGI is continually shifting. In Empire of AI, Hao argues that this vagueness allows OpenAI to define AGI in whatever way suits the company at any given moment. She argues that the company uses this nebulous, almost mystical goal to “interpret and reinterpret its mission accordingly, to entrench its dominance” (402).