Empire of AI Quotes

“Over the years, I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires. During the long era of European colonialism, empires seized and extracted resources that were not their own and exploited the labor of the people they subjugated to mine, cultivate, and refine those resources for the empires’ enrichment. They projected racist, dehumanizing ideas of their own superiority and modernity to justify—and even entice the conquered into accepting—the invasion of sovereignty, the theft, and the subjugation. They justified their quest for power by the need to compete with other empires: In an arms race, all bets are off. All this ultimately served to entrench each empire’s power and to drive its expansion and progress. In the simplest terms, empires amassed extraordinary riches across space and time, through imposing a colonial world order, at great expense to everyone else.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“There is a different way forward. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have to be what it is today. We don’t need to accept the logic of unprecedented scale and consumption to achieve advancement and progress. 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.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“The number of independent researchers not affiliated with or receiving funding from the tech industry has rapidly dwindled, diminishing the diversity of ideas in the field not tied to short-term commercial benefit.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“Over the years, I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“Under the hood, generative AI models are monstrosities, built from consuming previously unfathomable amounts of data, labor, computing power, and natural resources.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“predetermined. But the question of governance returns: Who will get to shape them?”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“In the simplest terms, empires amassed extraordinary riches across space and time, through imposing a colonial world order, at great expense to everyone else.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“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.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“The antidote to the mysticism and mirage of AI hype is to teach people about how AI works, about its strengths and shortcomings, about the systems that shape its development, about the worldviews and fallibility of the people and companies developing these technologies.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“Data is the last frontier of colonization,” Mahelona told me: The empires of old seized land from Indigenous communities and then forced them to buy it back, with new restrictive terms and services, if they wanted to regain ownership. “AI is just a land grab all over again. Big Tech likes to collect your data more or less for free—to build whatever they want to, whatever their endgame is—and then turn it around and sell it back to you as a service.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“The most successful founders do not set out to create companies,” Altman reflected on his blog in 2013. “They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“The frenetic Q* discourse and OpenAI’s reaction were a strange demonstration of how much the foundations of scientific inquiry in the AI field had eroded. Science is a process of consensus building. The significance of any advance—whether in AI or otherwise—tends to be highly subjective the moment that it happens. Only through peer review, the test of time, and sustained impact does a particular advance become elevated to “a breakthrough.” With OpenAI performing its work in secrecy—and the rest of the industry now following—the “breakthrough” label could really only be treated as a matter of the company’s opinion.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“OpenAI never did a comprehensive review of GPT-4’ s training data to check whether those exams—and their answers—were just in the data and being regurgitated, or whether GPT-4 had in fact developed a novel capability to pass them. It was the kind of shaky science that had become pervasive with the industry-wide shift from peer-reviewed to PR-reviewed research.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“It was all too easy for the privileged to grow accustomed to moving through the city in ways that shielded them from seeing the realities of how the other half lived. The dichotomy encapsulated how the tech industry could profess big, bold visions about changing the world and building a better future while ignoring the very problems at its door.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“The foundation of deep learning research rests on a simple premise: that the data used to train a model is not the same as the data used to test it. Without an ability to audit the training data, this so-called train-test-split paradigm falls apart. Models may not in fact be improving their “intelligence” when they score higher on different benchmarks. They may just be reciting the answers.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“It was a warning that Big AI was increasingly going the way of Big Tobacco, as two researchers put it, distorting and censoring critical scholarship against the interests of the public to escape scrutiny. It highlighted myriad other issues, including the complete concentration of talent, resources, and technologies in for-profit environments that allowed companies to act so audaciously because they knew they had little chance of being fact-checked independently; the continued abysmal lack of diversity within the spaces that had the most power to control these technologies; and the lack of employee protections against forceful and sudden retaliation if they tried to speak out about unethical corporate practices.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“it presented four key warnings: First, large language models were growing so vast that they were generating an enormous environmental footprint, as found in Strubell’s paper. This could exacerbate climate change, which ultimately affected everyone but had a disproportionate burden on Global South communities already suffering from broader political, social, and economic precarity. Second, the demand for data was growing so vast that companies were scraping whatever they could find on the internet, inadvertently capturing more toxic and abusive language as well as subtler racist and sexist references. This once again risked harming vulnerable populations the most in ways like the wrongful arrest of the Palestinian man or as documented in Noble’s work. Third, because such vast datasets were difficult to audit and scrutinize, it was extremely challenging to verify what was actually in them, making it harder to eradicate toxicity or more broadly ensure that they reflected evolving social norms and values. Finally, the model outputs were getting so good that people could easily mistake its statistically calculated outputs as language with real meaning and intent. This would make people prone not only to believing the text to be factual information but also to consider the model a competent adviser, a trustworthy confidant, and perhaps even something sentient.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“Not even in Silicon Valley did other companies and investors move until after ChatGPT to funnel unqualified sums into scaling. That included Google and DeepMind, OpenAI’s original rival. It was specifically OpenAI, with its billionaire origins, unique ideological bent, and Altman’s singular drive, network, and fundraising talent, that created a ripe combination for its particular vision to emerge and take over.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“It was a logic that worked under a specific assumption: that AGI, despite being amorphous and unknowable, was also inevitable. OpenAI would repeatedly justify its behaviors against variations of the same argument for years after. Under the specter of AGI’s unstoppable arrival, the company needed to keep developing more and more powerful models to prepare itself and to prepare society. Even if those models carried with them their own risks, the experience they offered to prevent or face possible AI apocalypse made those risks bearable.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“Even as a European coming from a highly overlapping culture to the US, he often felt alienated by the overwhelming bias in AI safety and other discussions toward American values and American norms.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“This is the empire’s logic: The perpetuation of the empire rests as much on rewarding those with power and privilege as it does on exploiting and depriving those, often far away and hidden from view, without them.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“Pop open the hood of a deep learning model and inside are only highly abstracted daisy chains of numbers. This is what researchers mean when they call deep learning “a black box.” They cannot explain exactly how the model will behave, especially in strange edge-case scenarios, because the patterns that the model has computed are not legible to humans.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“To justify the elongating timeline and the ever-expanding costs of pursuing the ambition for AI, the promises we’re told about it have grown more grandiose than ever before: AI was once a scientific fascination, a technology with some potential commercial utility. Now, AI is the harbinger of the fourth industrial revolution. The keystone of the modern superpower. AGI, if ever reached, will solve climate change, enable affordable health care, provide equitable education.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“Through decades of research, the definition of AI has changed as benchmarks have evolved, been rewritten, and been discarded. The goalposts for AI development are forever shifting and, as the research director at Data & Society Jenna Burrell once described it, an “ever-receding horizon of the future.” The technology’s advancement is headed toward an unknown objective, with no foreseeable end in sight.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“But the central problem is that there is no scientifically agreed-upon definition of intelligence.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“Since its conception, the development and use of AI has been propelled by tantalizing dreams of modernity and shaped by a narrow elite with the money and influence to bring forth their conception of the technology. That conception is what has led to the exploding social, labor, and environmental costs that are playing out around the world today, particularly, as we’ll see, in many Global South countries, for which the consequences of their dispossession by historical empires still linger in delayed economic development and weaker political institutions. And yet, just like the South Carolina congressman, Silicon Valley has painted the experiences of those being exploited and harmed by the technology as happier because of it.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“The name artificial intelligence was thus a marketing tool from the very beginning, the promise of what the technology could bring embedded within it. Intelligence sounds inherently good and desirable, sophisticated and impressive; something that society would certainly want more of; something that should deliver universal benefit.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“It is not just the actions of an AI agent that can produce side effects,” she and her coauthor wrote. “In real life, basic design choices involved in model creation and deployment processes also have consequences that reach far beyond the impact that a single model’s decision can have. In reality, for AI systems to even be built, there is very often a hidden human cost.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“Brockman was an engineer and a startup guy like Altman. He had grown up on a hobby farm in North Dakota. In between milking cows, he fell in love with math and then science. In 2008, he enrolled in Harvard and transferred to MIT two years later. After another semester, he dropped out of college entirely, unable to swallow any more school when he could be out in”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“Nevertheless, Annie’s experience contains striking parallels to the many themes explored within these pages: the ever-widening gulf between those who benefit and those left behind in the supposed march for progress; the loss of agency and voice among the disenfranchised confronted by that accelerating chasm; the limits of ceding so much power not just to companies but to the individuals who run them without the scaffolding to provide commensurate checks and balances.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI