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21 October 2025 - Adetswil
Karen Hao's Empire of AI is more than just a corporate history of OpenAI with an accompanying history of its cofounder and current CEO Sam Altman. It's also a polemic about the industry as a whole. There's a chapter on the the humans in poor countries in Africa receiving less than a living wage to help train the models' English language skills. There's a chapter about water resources be monopolized by data centers in South America to the detriment of locals, who get grey water or or wastewater in their taps while the data centers suck up the potable water. Of course there is the corporate history as well: Elon Musk's role in founding the company and then his disillusionment with Altman's manipulative dishonesty; the defection of some of the OpenAI leadership and staff to form Anthropic because they don't trust Altman with artificial general intelligence (AGI) if it's ever created; the ouster and the reinstatement of Altman when even the board of OpenAI decided he was dishonest and hiding things from them. Hao uses all this to temper the excitement one gets reading about the incredible success of OpenAI and its breakout consumer product, ChatGPT. Empire of AI is a timely and well-researched book.
