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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“But right as this new wave of companies sought to establish themselves, a strange thing happened. Sign-ups on their worker-facing platforms came rushing in from an unexpected country: Venezuela. In the same moment that auto giants began scrambling, money began pumping into self-driving cars, and data-annotation firms began looking for more workers, Venezuela was nose-diving headfirst into the worst peacetime economic crisis globally in fifty years. Economists say it was a toxic cocktail of political corruption and the government’s misguided policies that squandered the country’s rich natural endowment. Venezuela sits atop the largest proven petroleum reserves in the world. It was once Latin America’s wealthiest country. But beginning in 2016, hyperinflation went haywire; unemployment skyrocketed; violent crime exploded as families across the country watched the value of their entire life savings collapse. From late 2017 to 2019, escalating sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, intended as a punishment for Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian abuses, delivered the final death knell to Venezuela’s economy. Hyperinflation hit a once unfathomable 10 million percent. People with graduate degrees and previously well-paying jobs were now spending their days lining up in front of stores for a chance at receiving meager rations of rice and flour.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“OpenAI called this process of stress testing and refining the model “red teaming,” a term borrowed from the cybersecurity industry that refers to a systematic and thorough process of verifying the security of an organization and its capabilities to respond to an attack. OpenAI’s version of red teaming was and still is not the same thing, says Heidy Khlaaf, a safety engineer, cybersecurity expert, and AI researcher. It is patchy and ad hoc, and does not establish any guarantees on the safety and security of the model.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“OpenAI hired a small group of staff and contractors to review the applications developers were submitting to get access to the API, and to reject or approve them based on ad hoc rules the team drafted along the way. Many of the lines they drew were arbitrary. They decided to accept companion bots but not sex bots; to allow apps for generating social media copy but not ones that posted directly to social media platforms or impersonated public figures. “It was all vibes basically,” said a person who was involved with making the guidelines. “There was a lot of figuring it out as we were reviewing.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“The “Stochastic Parrots” paper became a rallying cry, driving home a central question: What kind of future are we building with AI? By and for whom?”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“That moment also became far bigger than Gebru or Google itself. It became a symbol of the intersecting challenges that plagued the AI industry. 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”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

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

“Anthropic people would later frame The Divorce, as some called it, as a disagreement over OpenAI’s approach to AI safety. While this was true, it was also about power. As much as Dario Amodei was motivated by a desire to do what was right within his principles and to distance himself from Altman, he also wanted greater control of AI development to pursue it based on his own values and ideology. He and the other Anthropic founders would build up their own mythology about why Anthropic, not OpenAI, was a better steward of what they saw as the most consequential technology. In Anthropic meetings, Amodei would regularly punctuate company updates with the phrase “unlike Sam” or “unlike OpenAI.” But in time, Anthropic would show little divergence from OpenAI’s approach, varying only in style but not in substance.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“tremendous destruction,” she writes. “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“The ability to advance them is driven by a collective belief that they are worth advancing. The irony is that for this very reason, new technologies rarely default to bringing widespread prosperity, the authors continue. Those who successfully rally for a technology’s creation are those who have the power and resources to do the rallying. As they turn their ideas into reality, the vision they impose—of what the technology is and whom it can benefit—is thus the vision of a narrow elite, imbued with all their blind spots and self-serving philosophies. Only through cataclysmic shifts in society or powerful organized resistance can a technology transform from enriching the few to lifting the many.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“The empires of AI are not engaged in the same overt violence and brutality that marked this history. But they”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination

“Over the years”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination

“Under the hood”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination

“Artificial intelligence is a technology that takes many forms. It is in fact a multitude of technologies that shape-shift and evolve”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination

“different axes of power. This book touches on three: knowledge, resources, and influence. As it stands now, OpenAI and its competitor empires have control of each of them: through centralizing talent, eroding open science, and sealing their models from public scrutiny, they control knowledge production; through hoarding funding, data, labor, compute, energy, and land, they control and diminish other people's resources; through creating and reinforcing ideologies and producing wildly popular demonstrations that captivate global imagination, they command far-reaching influence. Each of these reinforces the other. Controlling knowledge production fuels influence; growing influence accumulates resources; amassing resources secures knowledge production.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

“The critiques that I lay out in this book of OpenAI's and Silicon Valley's broader vision are not by any means meant to dismiss AI in its entirety. What I reject is the dangerous notion that broad benefit from AI can only be derived from - indeed, will ever emerge from - a vision for the technology that requires the complete capitulation of our privacy, our agency, and our worth, including the value of our labor and art, toward an ultimately imperial centralization project. Te Hiku shows us another way. It imagines how AI and its development could be exactly the opposite. Models can be small and task specific, their training data contained and knowable, ridding the incentives for widespread exploitative and psychologically harmful labor practices and all-consuming extractivism of producing and running massive supercomputers. The creation of AI can be community driven, consensual, respectful of local context and history; its application can uplift and strengthen marginalized communities; its governance can be inclusive and democratic.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

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

“which also reported based on chat logs provided by his wife that the chatbot ultimately encouraged the man to kill himself.”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI