When journalist Karen Hao first profiled OpenAI in 2020, it was a little-known startup. Five years and one very popular chatbot later, the company has transformed into a dominant force in the fast-expanding AI sector — one Hao likens to a 'modern-day colonial world order' in her new book, 'Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI'.
Hao tells that this isn’t a comparison she made lightly. Drawing on years of reporting in Silicon Valley and further afield to countries where generative AI’s impact is perhaps most acutely felt, she makes the case that, like empires of old, AI firms are building their wealth off of resource extraction and labour exploitation.
This critique stands in stark contrast to the vision promoted by industry leaders like Altman, who portray AI as a tool for human advancement — from boosting productivity to improving healthcare. Empires, Hao contends, cloaked their conquests in the language of progress too.
Your work has culminated in your new book 'Empire of AI'. What story were you hoping to tell?
Once I started covering AI, I realised that it was a microcosm of all of the things that I wanted to explore: how technology affects society, how people interface with it, the incentives (and) misaligned incentives within Silicon Valley. I was very lucky in getting to observe AI and also OpenAI before everyone had their ChatGPT moment; and I wanted to add more context to that moment that everyone experienced and show them this technology comes from a specific place. It comes from a specific group of people and to understand its trajectory and how it's going to impact us in the future.
How did Netflix drama 'The Crown' it influence your storytelling approach?
The title 'Empire of AI' refers to OpenAI and this argument that (AI represents) a new form of empire and the reason I make this argument is because there are many features of empires of old that empires of AI now check off. They lay claim to resources that are not their own, including the data of millions and billions of people who put their data online, without actually understanding that it could be taken to be trained for AI models. They exploit a lot of labour around the world — meaning they contract workers who they pay very little to do their data annotation and content moderation for these AI models. And they do it under the civilising mission, this idea that they're bringing benefit to all of humanity.
It took me a really long time to figure out how to structure a book that goes back and forth between all these different communities and characters and contexts. I ended up thinking a lot about 'The Crown' because every episode, no matter who it's about, is ultimately profiling this global system of power.
Can you share an example that highlights the real-world consequences of its rise?
One of the things that people don't really realise is that AI is not magic and it actually requires an extremely large amount of human labour and human judgment to create these technologies. These AI companies will go to Global South countries to contract workers for very low wages where they will either annotate data that needs to go into training these training models or they will perform content moderation or they will converse with the models and then upvote and downvote their answers and slowly teach them into saying more helpful things.
How do you see the industry's growth balancing with sustainability efforts?
These data centres and supercomputers, the size that we're talking about is something that has become unfathomable to the average person. There are data centres that are being built that will be 1,000 to 2,000 megawatts, which is around one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half times the energy demand of San Francisco. OpenAI has even drafted plans where they were talking about building supercomputers that would be 5,000 megawatts, which would be the average demand of the entire city of New York City.
How has your perspective on AI changed, if at all?
Writing this book made me even more concerned because I realised the extent to which these companies have a controlling influence over everything now. Before I was worried about the labour exploitation, the environmental impacts, the impact on the job market. But through the reporting of the book, I realised the horizontal concern that cuts across all this is if we return to an age of empire, we no longer have democracy. Because in a world where people no longer have agency and ownership over their data, their land, their energy, their water, they no longer feel like they can self-determine their future. — Reuters
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