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Empire of AI summary

Name: Empire of AI
Rating: 4.1 (171 reviews)
Author: Karen Hao

Karen Hao

Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

4.1 (171 ratings)

22 mins

Brief summary

Empire of AI delves into artificial intelligence's profound impact on global power dynamics. Karen Hao examines the geopolitical implications and ethical considerations, offering insights into the transformative nature of AI in shaping our future.

Topics

Innovation Strategy Artificial Intelligence Entrepreneurship Big Tech Work Culture

Table of Contents

Empire of AI
Summary of 5 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 5

What’s in it for me? Uncover the truth behind the AI revolution.

You’ve probably used ChatGPT, or heard someone rave about how AI will transform everything from health care to education. Like many, you’ve probably marveled at its capabilities. Maybe this new tool could save you time. Maybe it could emancipate humanity from work forever. But, perhaps you’ve also felt a nagging unease about where this is all heading – and what it means for the survival of humanity.

Well, behind the hype lies a story, one of how a nonprofit founded to democratize AI for humanity’s benefit has morphed into a $157 billion empire. And it’s precisely this story that you’ll discover in this Blink – a narrative that sometimes sounds more like dystopian fiction rather than recent history. By the end, you’ll understand how OpenAI went from refusing to release GPT-2 for safety reasons to rushing ChatGPT to market in a mere two weeks.

These events are important to help understand the world today – one increasingly tying its fate to that of AI. Once you see past OpenAI’s sterile PR narrative about progress, you'll have a better idea whether AI is truly redistributing power to you – or simply fortifying an empire built on your data, your creativity, and your trust.

With that said, let’s go back to the very beginning – to a private dinner where the seeds of our current reality were unwittingly planted.

A new beginning

The guests were all seated except for one – Elon Musk was over an hour late.

It’s 2015, and Sam Altman, the 30-year-old president of Y Combinator, is watching as guests arrive for an intimate dinner. The venue? The prestigious Rosewood Hotel. His guests? Some of Silicon Valley’s top minds on artificial intelligence. The agenda? One item: to discuss the future of humanity. Between courses of Wagyu beef, of course.

An hour after the dinner was meant to start, Musk finally arrives. For him, the purpose of the dinner is to put a stop to months of anxiety – an anxiety rooted in Google’s purchase of the AI lab DeepMind for a measly $500 million. It was keeping him awake at night, and even led to him clashing with his friend and Google cofounder, Larry Page. While Page saw superintelligence as the next logical step in evolution, Musk disagreed. Page even called Musk a “speciesist” – someone who discriminated against nonhuman intelligence.

After Musk took his seat at the table, Altman started to address the assembled group. Musk had studied Altman – in their email exchanges, the young man had said all the right things about AI safety. Altman’s stated goal was to create the world’s first general AGI, or artificial general intelligence – and to harness it for individual empowerment. Most importantly, they both shared the conviction that it should be safety-focussed and not for the purpose of profit. Or so Musk thought.

So they began to pitch their vision for an AI lab to all those assembled – one free from Google's commercial pressures. Musk pledged up to a billion dollars, and the deal was sealed. They would call it OpenAI and, importantly, it would be a nonprofit.

But by 2017, the nonprofit dream was meeting with a harsh reality. The reality was quickly dawning upon them that building AGI would require billions of dollars annually to afford the tens of thousands of GPUs needed. The nonprofit structure was a dead end. So, the leadership began to discuss what had been previously unthinkable: OpenAI had to transform into a for-profit company.

But who would be CEO of such an entity? A power struggle ensued. Musk’s plan was to fold OpenAI into Tesla, using his existing riches to battle Google. But Altman had different plans. He appealed directly to key leaders, framing Musk as too “erratic” to lead the company. Could they really trust AGI in the hands of one all-powerful, unpredictable man?

The maneuver worked and the showdown was over. In early 2018, outmaneuvered and defeated, Musk announced his departure at a tense all-hands meeting. He didn’t go quietly, though. He told the stunned employees that OpenAI would fail as a nonprofit – and that he would now pursue the mission of safe AGI at Tesla instead. He then walked away – and took his money with him.

Altman stood victorious, but he was the president of a company with a dangerously empty bank account. The safety-obsessed cofounder was gone. How could OpenAI plug the holes in its coffers?

The price of scale

With Musk gone, OpenAI’s nonprofit dream seemed dead and buried. But something was starting to take shape that might make all the drama worth it. This something emanated from the mind of Ilya Sutskever – the chief scientist Musk and Altman had poached from Google.

While others debated novel AI architectures, Sutskever started developing an idea – if the intelligence of different species correlated with the size of their brains, why wouldn’t AI follow the same principle? Basically, if he was right – and artificial nodes were like neurons in the human brain – then artificial intelligence wouldn’t require a new architecture at all. It just needed more computing power – and much more data.

The deal that changed everything

In the summer of 2019, Altman found himself at the most exclusive gathering of the American capitalist class. This was, of course, the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. Little did he know that it was here where a partnership was about to be formed, one that would solve his computation problem – and set history in motion.

It was here that Altman found a counterpart in Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Nadella was anxious – Google was winning the AI race, publishing groundbreaking research and acquiring the field’s top minds. Altman, in turn, was facing his own problem of computational hunger that his scaling doctrine required.

The war for OpenAI

In late 2020, employees watched a video all-hands where Dario Amodei, one of OpenAI’s top safety researchers, read a canned statement – he, his sister Daniela, and several others were leaving. The next year, they announced their own public benefit corporation: Anthropic. Their departure was an early warning shot against the company’s pivot to commercialization, one that went unheeded.

Fast forward to 2023 – and with the company hurtling forward on the success of ChatGPT, Ilya Sutskever found himself the last remaining founder who embodied that original safety-first position. As OpenAI’s chief scientist, he’d been the primary architect of the very scaling doctrine that made everything possible. He was, in a sense, at war with himself – thrilled by the progress, yet terrified by the implications.

The final gambit

Sutskever’s move set the board in motion. Independent directors Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley, and Adam D’Angelo began meeting in secret, almost daily. Their accusations against Altman centered around a lack of transparency as well as patterns of manipulation and lying – sometimes to the point where he seemed not to even believe himself.

On Friday, November 17, at noon Pacific time, Altman joined a Google Meet with four board members. Sutskever was brief: “You're fired.” Witnesses say Altman fell silent, stunned, looking away to compose himself. Its public statement was surgical, concluding that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

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What is Empire of AI about?

Empire of AI (2025) chronicles the evolution of OpenAI from an idealistic nonprofit into a $157 billion empire. It details the messy power struggles, untold human tragedies, and backroom partnerships that defined the unlikely race to build ChatGPT. This explosive goes beyond the hype and helps you to understand the real power dynamics shaping the technology that could very well define your future.

Who should read Empire of AI?

Users of ChatGPT curious about how the technology came into being
Anyone concerned with the hidden ethical costs of new technologies
Tech enthusiasts who love stories of Silicon Valley power

About the Author

Karen Hao is an award-winning journalist specializing in the societal impacts of artificial intelligence. She’s served as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and as the senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. Her reporting is regularly taught in universities and has been cited by governments, establishing her as a leading voice on the subject

Categories with Empire of AI

Entrepreneurship Corporate Culture Technology & the Future

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