Karen Hao - "Empire of AI" - Eric Sears
Karen Hao will discuss her new book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. She will be in conversation with Eric Sears. A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion.
At the Co-op
About the Book: When longtime AI expert and journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, it was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely market forces.
But the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that it requires an unprecedented amount of proprietary resources: the ‘compute’ power of scarce high-end chips, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans on the ground ‘cleaning it up’ for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the need for energy and water underlying everything. We have entered a new, ominous age of empire with OpenAI setting a breakneck pace, as a small group of the most valuable companies in human history try to chase it down.
In exhilarating prose and with unparalleled access to those closest to Sam Altman, Hao recounts the meteoric rise of OpenAI and shows us the sinister impact that this industry is having on society.
About the Author: Karen Hao is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter covering the impacts of artificial intelligence on society. She was the first journalist to profile OpenAI and wrote a book, EMPIRE OF AI, about the company and its global implications, which became an instant New York Times bestseller. She writes for publications including The Atlantic and leads the Pulitzer Center's AI Spotlight Series, a program training journalists around the world on how to cover AI. She also sits on the AI advisory board of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She was formerly a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, covering American and Chinese tech companies, and a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. Her work is regularly taught in universities and cited by governments. She has received numerous accolades for her coverage, including an American Humanist Media Award and American National Magazine Award for Journalists Under 30. She received her Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from MIT.
About the Interlocutor: Eric Sears is Director of the Technology in the Public Interest program at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The program's grantmaking seeks to advance interdisciplinary research, policy, and practice that centers public interest considerations in the design, use, and governance of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Prior to establishing the Technology in the Public Interest program, Eric was Senior Program Officer at MacArthur and managed a grantmaking portfolio at the intersection of human rights and technology. He has previously worked at Human Rights First in New York City and Amnesty International in Washington, D.C.
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