Join us at Unity Bookshop for a our first collective reading session to tackle the multiple forms of contemporary fascism — this time we chose techno-fascism — and deepen our knowledge, activate our critical thinking, and debate together.
Come and get a piece of the book: read amongst your peers for 45 minutes, then discuss and analyse the text as a group for another 45 minutes, bringing our collective knowledge together at the end.
Free event, donations welcome.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI AuthorKaren HaoCover artistDaniel LaginLanguageEnglishGenreBiographyPublisherPenguin Press (U.S.)Publication dateMay 20, 2025Publication placeUnited StatesMedia typeE-book, print (hardback), and audiobookPages496 pp.ISBN978-0593657508
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI is a book by Karen Hao released on May 20, 2025. It focuses on the history of OpenAI and its culture of secrecy and devotion to the promise of artificial general intelligence (AGI) while extracting vast amounts of resources and exploiting workers.
The book includes interviews with around 260 people, correspondence, Slack conversations, and relevant documents.[1][2] The title makes reference to colonial empires of the 1800s.[3]
Origins
Hao visited OpenAI's offices and covered the company for the MIT Technology Review two years before ChatGPT was released in November 2022.[4][5] Her experience there and reporting on topics of AI and "AI colonialism" for seven years led her to develop the book's thesis and title, Empire of AI, and ultimately became published as a book.[3][4][6]
Overview
Hao covers the history of OpenAI that is sourced from employee interviews and relevant documents. Additionally, Hao covers the departure of early investor Elon Musk, the reinstatement of Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman after being forced out by OpenAI's board,[4] and reports from Colombia, the Philippines, Venezuela, and Kenya,[7] where she interviews low-wage contract workers categorized the severity of graphic content used to train ChatGPT.[2] The book also covers OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever obsession with artificial general intelligence (AGI) by summer 2023, while also becoming concerned about the way OpenAI was handling the technology it was developing.[8]