Latest news with #EmpireofAI


Toronto Star
36 minutes ago
- Business
- Toronto Star
Toronto Star bestsellers: A new book about the ‘ominous age' of AI joins the non-fiction list
Karen Hao's bestseller 'Empire of AI' began with her coverage of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Michael Dwyer/The Associated Press file photo


Hindustan Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Book Box: How to cope with AI anxiety
Dear Reader, Empire of AI ticks all the boxes. These days, I see AI writing everywhere—on LinkedIn, in text messages from colleagues, and even in substack newsletters. There's something about these polished pieces of prose, glib and formulaic, with their idiosyncratic sentence structures and excessive dashes, that end up depressing me. Many of my writer friends won't touch AI. 'We can write just fine without it,' they say. But I can't stay away. I face my AI anxiety by finding out what this new beast is. As a teacher of management, and as someone who has pivoted careers three times already, I feel compelled to keep up with the times. AI making all writers redundant I sign up for 'Prompt Engineering 101 for Journalists' conducted by the non-profit Knight Centre. It teaches me how to prompt AI to 'red-team' my writing—to critique flaws rather than default to dishing out praise. And to watch out for AI 'hallucinations' like made-up names of books and fake quotations falsely attributed to real people. I stay conflicted: is it okay to use large language models that ride on the backs of writers and artists, that have learned by scraping creative works with no regard for privacy or copyright? And what about the environmental toll—the depredations on water and energy that the data centres inflict, especially in developing countries? I look for my answers in books about AI. Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World is a 2024 book by Parmy Olson that won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year. It takes me close to AI stars like Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dennis Hassabis of DeepMind, as well as to the dangers of decision-making being left to a tiny elite. But it leaves me wanting more. A friend recommends The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, a memoir by Chinese-American scientist Dr. Fei-Fei Li. It begins with an exciting chapter, with Fei-Fei traveling from her West Coast Google office to Washington, D.C., to testify to a US Senate committee on the direction of AI research. For many pages I am enraptured, reading Fei-Fei's family history, how she helped her parents run their dry cleaning store while studying at Princeton and then working at Stanford. Li has been a pioneer in AI image recognition with her ImageNet project, and this makes for fascinating reading. The book veers between scientific excitement, and apprehension at where AI research is going, and confirms my unease over the economic and existential implications of this new technology. Then I discover Empire of AI by Karen Hao. From the very first page, I am highlighting lines, drawn in by Hao's historical analysis of AI research over the years, everything from the 'AI winter' to the dispute between two schools of AI research—the symbolists and the connectionists. Empire of AI ticks all the boxes. It is rich in history and human detail, demystifying core concepts like deep learning and neural networks. Hao gives us the stars like Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman—and also the workers, the data labelers and content moderators like Mophat Okinyi, Oskarina Fuentes Anaya, and shows the havoc that AI jobs have brought to their lives, as they are forced to deal with explicit sexual content and violent images and to perform AI training tasks for a pittance. For me, the most moving part is the story of Sam Altman's sister Annie Altman, who turned to sex work, having suffered huge health challenges and trapped in severe financial duress, against Sam's lifestyle featuring multimillion-dollar homes and luxury cars. 'Annie's story also complicates the grand narrative that Sam and other OpenAI executives have painted of AI ushering in a world of abundance. Altman has said that he expects AI to end poverty... And yet, against the reality of the lives of the workers in Kenya, activists in Chile, and Altman's own sister's experience bearing the brunt of all of these problems, those dreams ring hollow', says Hao. I put aside Empire of AI to go back to my day. I know it's ironic and it feels very meta, but after writing this, I ask Deepseek to design a brief depicting a writer dealing with the good and bad sides of AI, and then I use that output to ask Gemini to design the illustrations for me. AI, the perfect productivity tool ? That evening as I walk down towards the market to buy a AI-recommended geyser, I find myself grateful for Karen Hao's book. Because if AI's future is being written by the Altmans and the Musks of the world, excluding large sections of the world, there are things we can do to participate. Reading books like Hao's pushes us to pay attention—to the workers behind the algorithms, to the biases in the data, to the futures we're building one query at a time. Books like these arm us to fight back - to push for policy changes, demand transparency in training data, and support ethical AI movements. So yes, I will use AI. But I'll also keep reading and buying subscriptions to real writers and real news outlets, because the best defence against a dystopian future is to dream of a better one, and then to fight for it. What about you, dear Reader? Do you find AI more anxiety-inducing or enabling? Or a complex mix of both? And can you suggest any other such books on AI that we can add to this vital reading list? (Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya's Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at sonyasbookbox@
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Science Fiction 'Hugely Shapes OpenAI's Imagination And Where They're Going,' Author Karen Hao Says
OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman is 'deeply obsessed' with the 2013 film Her, according to technology journalist Karen Hao. 'Science fiction hugely shapes OpenAI's imagination and where they're going,' Hao said during a discussion Tuesday of her bestselling new book, Empire of AI, hosted by the Pulitzer Center in New York. More from Deadline Luca Guadagnino Eyes 'Artificial' At Amazon MGM As Next Movie With Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro And 'Anora' Actor Yura Borisov Circling Sky Boss Dana Strong Raises Artificial Intelligence Copyright Concerns: "I Can't Fathom How A Small Producer Keeps Up" Tastes Great, Less Filling? Report On Meta Plan For Cheaper, Fully AI-Made Ads Boosts Tech Giant's Stock As Media Agency Shares Slump Altman 'has evoked throughout OpenAI's history his idea that Her is the thing that OpenAI should building,' the author said of the film directed by Spike Jonze and starring Joaquin Phoenix and the voice of Scarlett Johansson. 'Artificial generative intelligence doesn't have a definition, and so they actually use pop culture as the way to describe and put a shape to the nebulous thing that they're trying to achieve.' An 'under-talked-about' current in the world of AI, Hao said, is the 'deep, intertwined relationship between science fiction and pop culture portrayals of these things and, ultimately, the technologies that we get. Because a lot of these people are sci-fi nerds and they want these things, and then it shapes their beliefs, their ideas of what they want to do.' Hao was interviewed by Marina Walker Guevara, the executive editor at the Pulitzer Center who previously oversaw the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigative journalism projects. Empire of AI, which was published two weeks ago, is one of two new books to profile Altman, along with Keach Hagey's The Optimist. Hao, by her own description, is delivering a 'critique' of the arms race that AI has become. Much of her talk focused on her reporting around the world documenting the harmful effects of AI, including communities whose water supply has been compromised by data center construction. Low-paid workers in the global south, she writes, must sift through reams of objectionable content in order to train large-language models. Her book also traces the development of OpenAI, which began as a well-intentioned non-profit co-founded by Elon Musk before turning into a commercial entity worth billions of dollars and funded by Microsoft. A central question during the discussion was whether there are ways to push back against the immense wealth and dominance of Silicon Valley. 'Every community that I spoke to, regardless of that there were artists having their intellectual property taken or water activists who were having the fresh water taken, they were all saying the same exact thing. When they encounter the empire, they feel this incredible loss of agency, a profound loss of the agency to self-determine their people,' Hao said. If that loss is permitted, she argued, 'democracy cannot survive, because democracy is based on the fact that people feel that agency and they' willing to go to the booth to vote, because they know that it will matter. And so the theme that I find hopeful is that there are so many movements that I encountered around the world that are now trying to reclaim that the agency.' She cited a protest in Chile, where activists managed to hold tech companies to account for the way their AI projects were harming the water supply. 'If we we allow this to happen 100,000-times-fold, if we really amplify and support this work, that is how we can get this trajectory of air development to turn from a more imperial approach, and top-down, 'we just say whatever we want and it goes' to a more broad-based, democratically beneficial version of AI,' Hao said. Best of Deadline 2025 TV Series Renewals: Photo Gallery 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More Everything We Know About 'Nobody Wants This' Season 2 So Far


CNBC
03-06-2025
- General
- CNBC
The great divide between those who see AI as a force for good, and those who say it's dangerous
Karen Hao, author of the new book "Empire of AI", discusses the clear dividing line between those in the tech space who believe AI can lead to utopia and those who think it will only create massive problems, and perhaps the end of the human race.


Time of India
27-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
OpenAI co-founder wanted a 'doomsday bunker,' for the ChatGPT team and why CEO Sam Altman is the reason behind it
Former OpenAI chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever told his research team in 2023 that the company would need to build a protective bunker, often known as 'doomsday bunker,' before releasing artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to new revelations from an upcoming book about the AI company's internal turmoil. "We're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI," Sutskever declared during a 2023 meeting with OpenAI scientists, months before his departure from the company. When pressed about the seriousness of his proposal, he assured colleagues that bunker entry would be "optional." The startling disclosure comes from excerpts of "Empire of AI," a forthcoming book by former Wall Street Journal correspondent Karen Hao based on interviews with 90 current and former OpenAI employees. The book details the dramatic November 2023 boardroom coup that briefly ousted CEO Sam Altman , with Sutskever playing a central role in the failed takeover. Sutskever, who co-created the groundbreaking AlexNet in 2012 alongside AI pioneer Geoff Hinton, believed his fellow researchers would require protection once AGI was achieved. He reasoned that such powerful technology would inevitably become "an object of intense desire for governments globally." What made OpenAI co-founder want a 'doomsday bunker' Sutskever and others worried that CEO Altman's focus on commercial success was compromising the company's commitment to developing AI safely. These tensions were exacerbated by ChatGPT 's unexpected success, which unleashed a "funding gold rush" that safety-minded Sutskever could no longer control. "There is a group of people—Ilya being one of them—who believe that building AGI will bring about a rapture," one researcher told Hao. "Literally a rapture." This apocalyptic mindset partially motivated Sutskever's participation in the board revolt against Altman. However, the coup collapsed within a week, leading to Altman's return and the eventual departure of Sutskever and other safety-focused researchers. The failed takeover, now called "The Blip" by insiders, left Altman more powerful than before while driving out many of OpenAI's safety experts who were aligned with Sutskever's cautious approach. Since leaving OpenAI, Sutskever has founded Safe Superintelligence Inc., though he has declined to comment on his previous bunker proposals. His departure represents a broader exodus of safety-focused researchers who felt the company had abandoned its original mission of developing AI that benefits humanity broadly, rather than pursuing rapid commercialization. The timing of AGI remains hotly debated across the industry. While Altman recently claimed AGI is possible with current hardware, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman disagrees, predicting it could take up to 10 years to achieve. Google leaders Sergey Brin and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis see AGI arriving around 2030. However, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton warns there's no consensus on what AGI actually means, calling it "a serious, though ill-defined, concept." Despite disagreements over definitions and timelines, most industry leaders now view AGI as an inevitability rather than a possibility. AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now