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

by Karen Hao

The drama highlighted one of the most urgent questions of our generation: How do we govern artificial intelligence?

multitude of technologies

with the ideological drives of the people who create them

subjective choices,

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.

So much of what our society actually needs—better health care and education, clean air and clean water, a faster transition away from fossil fuels—can be assisted and advanced with, and sometimes even necessitates, significantly smaller AI models and a diversity of other approaches. AI alone won’t be enough, either: We’ll also need more social cohesion and global cooperation, some of the very things being challenged by the existing vision of AI development.