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

by Karen Hao

A continent away, Okinyi is also organizing. In May 2023, a little over a year after OpenAI’s contract with Sama abruptly ended, he became an organizer of the Kenya-based African Content Moderators Union, which seeks to fight for better wages and better treatment of African workers who perform the internet’s worst labor. Half a year later, after going public about his OpenAI experience through my article in The Wall Street Journal, he also started a nonprofit of his own called Techworker Community Africa, TCA, with one of his former Sama colleagues Richard Mathenge. In August 2024, as we caught up, Okinyi envisioned building TCA into a resource both for the African AI data worker community and for international groups and policymakers seeking to support them. He had been organizing online conferences and in-school assemblies to teach workers and students, especially women, about their labor and data privacy rights and the inner workings of the AI industry. He was seeking funding to open a training center for upskilling people. He had met with US representatives who came to visit Nairobi to better understand the experience of workers serving American tech companies. He was fielding various requests from global organizations, including Equidem, a human and labor rights organization focused on supporting workers in the Global South, and the Oxford Internet Institute’s Fairwork project.