Customers say
Customers find the book insightful and well-researched, appreciating how it shows the history of AI. They describe it as an incredible read and praise its writing quality.
Make It Yours – See Your Price On Amazon!
A quick rundown of this product’s key features:
From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman’s OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy
When AI expert and investigative 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, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?
Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.
Our Top Reviews
Reviewer: Mike
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: An Inside View Into the Questionable People and Practices Driving LLMs
Review: An incredibly well written and thoroughly well researched book by Hao. The density of facts, references, interviews and quotes to create a riveting narrative is remarkable. I was able to finish the +400 pages in 5 sittings, while taking notes. It was a page turner, but one I intend to reference going forward. And the notes section is a great guide for further reading.Some will say the book is Doomer’ism. Sure. If you say so.I guess telling people not to smoke, to eat healthy and treat each other with kindness could be a form of Doomer’ism too. Yet, we know smoking, processed foods and being mean isn’t good for you and others. But, if you’re hooked on the nicotine rush of smoking, the cravings of processed foods, or the dopamine rush of dunking on someone on Twitter… well. When people tell you those things are bad, you may just say, “Stop being such a Doomer! Live a little!”Likewise, when someone points out that AI has a lot of bad outcomes, some of which are not in plain sight or immediately felt, that may not sit well with folks who are addicted, get a rush from it or will benefit from it. More, importantly, these companies are driven by VC firms whose goal is power, profit and consolidating control through every more obfuscation at the expense of the consumer.Is the book good? YES. Should you buy it, read it? YES.I have worked in the field directly since 2018, indirectly for several years prior. I have done enterprise business directly with OpenAI, Anthropic and other GenAI vendors, as well as the consultancies pushing said solutions. I deeply familiar with their solutions and businesses. Hao’s book does a spectacular job of uncovering the behind the scenes details of these companies, from how the models are trained, where the data comes from, the utter lack of transparency; to the questionable ethos and actions of Altman, Dario and others.More, Hao’s conclusions and recommendations about how to responsibly us AI are spot on. She is NOT saying there is no use for AI. Rather, there is a better way. And the better way is not what is being done by OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Microsoft or any of the other major tech vendors.I highly recommend the book.
Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Must-read for everyone!
Review: Wow! What an incredible read! I am an AI engineer and I thought I knew quite a bit about the AI industry and what OpenAI and other AI heavy weights have been doing and why. But after reading this book, I have to admit that I was overly confident on my understanding of OpenAI and the AI industry in general. The OpenAI stories behind closed doors are so fascinating to read and so insightful to help me better understand how OpenAI was initially formed, why it has become what it is today, and where it may be going. Also I never realized that the severity and scope of AI’s impact on the environment and on people and communities in the AI supply chain are so wide and deep! Clearly there is a knowledge gap even among AI professionals like me on the reality of AI development and its impact to humanity. It is probably even more so for the general public. AI is impacting all of us, regardless who you are and if you like it or not. To get deeper awareness and be better prepared for the AI era, please do yourself a favor and read this incredible book!
Reviewer: Steve VN
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Must read. Great book to show the history of AI and how to avoid being destroyed by it
Review: The first two chapters are a soap opera about Sam Alten. The rest of the book is exceptional reporting on the research and personal experience into AI by Karen Hao. The fake concern of AI gurus for ethics in AI is exposed and shows that the producers of AI and chat bots are greedy money grubbers first and foremost. The perils of AI are so well presented that you will be inspired to do things and alter how you use AI and chat to avoid making a fool of yourself.
Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Comprehensive review of trajectory of AI development
Review: A fascinating book on the trajectory of AI development.While partly focused on Sam Altman of OpenAI, the book is a much broader critique of AI’s development and its capture by corporate power.This was a well researched and gripping book. It was a little long, however, and might have benefitted from either being a smaller volume or separate books.
Reviewer: Sogood
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Unless you are trained in AI, This is a must read
Review: Fascinating story of how AGI came into being and then evolved. The end of the story is followed by 400 pages of notes! Talk about evidence based learning!
Reviewer: Kindle Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Must read. Reflect the Impact of AI.
Review: This is a very interesting read on a super important topic. This book invites us to be aware of and to act on the parallelism between AI and colonialism.
Reviewer: Ralphie’s Mom
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Beautiful Book (Empire of AI)
Review: Arrived quickly and in beautiful condition!! Looking forward to reading this compelling book!!
Reviewer: Andreas Ahlborn
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: This book comes across as strongly opinionated and contrarian, which i personally like, but it’s maybe not everyone’s cup of tea. It makes a strong argument that the current form of how the downsides of ai are completely outsourced to third world countries and therefore just another version of tech colonialism, what hao calls extractivism. For hao the current chaos in ai is mostly the fault of sam Altman and his hyper scale enablers, but i doubt that the truth is as black and white as she paints it. As a frequent user of OpenAI s products the book certainly helped me to have a more critical perspective on their mission and the blood, sweat and tears that were globally spent too make ever more larger parts of humanity economically useless.
Reviewer: AnonymousVoice
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Extremely well researched book that’s also extremely biased against AI. It’s shining the light into one side of the room while keeping the other side in the dark, and then there’s lots of interpretation in the gray area of the light cone’s border.For instance, in the book AI companies don’t scale swiftly but “aggressively”, AI makers who care for security merely “frame it” as such, and so on. And practically nothing is said about the amazing new creative uses of gen AI which, like the early days of photography, enable new forms of artistic expression. Rather, we see repetition of the news trope of “artists vs AI” when much of it today is “artists with AI”.To then expect a more two-sided view of the debate around fair use, or how already overarching copyrights stifle artistic innovation, is a lost cause. The economic fear is real, but some of the arguments of energy or water consumption put forth — often by meat-eaters, nonetheless! — seem after-the-fact reasoning. You join a team, then you find an argument. And I’m saying this as someone who finds the economic fears, and the existential risks, understandable.And yet, with all this in mind, I follow “It’s not about what you read, but how you read”, and for the many important points the author makes, and the myriad of inside interviews, it’s absolutely worth reading. The psychopathic way many AI companies treat workers in other countries, for instance, having them be subjected to traumatic material at minimum pay to rate content, is worth nothing short of an investigation — and certainly change. It also puts those companies’ holy press spins into a (decolonizing) perspective.Karen Hao is an excellent investigative reporter, and she put the drama behind things like Sam Altman’s brief ousting from his company into a movie-worthy page turner. She also takes on the position of the underdogs, powerless and already disenfranchised, and good journalism should do just that — question power.Maybe one day we get a follow-up book where the author looks into more of the great uses of AI from underrepresented communities. Just this year, for example, we’re seeing movies using AI take off, and we find that it allows previously unheard voices to have a say, Hollywood-approval be damned. Her last chapter hints at this — AI being used to keep a language alive which was almost destroyed by colonization — and this angle would be worth a whole book. AI can be a tool: for bad, but also for good.
Price effective as of Jun 19, 2025 18:58:35 UTC
As an Amazon Associate Dealors may receive a commission for purchases made through these links.
