With that stated, Empire of AI is a robust work, bristling not solely with nice reporting but additionally with massive concepts. This comes throughout in service to 2 most important themes.
The primary is easy: It’s the story of ambition overriding ethics. The historical past of OpenAI as Hao tells it (and as Hagey does too) may be very a lot a story of an organization that was based on the idealistic want to create a safety-focused synthetic common intelligence however as a substitute grew to become extra excited about successful. It is a story we’ve seen many occasions earlier than in Huge Tech. See Theranos, which was going to make diagnostics simpler, or Uber, which was based to interrupt the cartel of “Huge Taxi.” However the closest analogue is likely to be Google, which went from “Don’t be evil” to (at the very least within the eyes of the courts) unlawful monopolist. For that matter, contemplate how Google went from holding off on releasing its language mannequin as a shopper product out of an abundance of warning to dashing a chatbot out the door to meet up with and beat OpenAI. In Silicon Valley, it doesn’t matter what one’s unique intent, it at all times comes again to successful.
The second theme is extra complicated and types the e book’s thesis about what Hao calls AI colonialism. The concept is that the massive AI firms act like conventional empires, siphoning wealth from the underside rungs of society within the types of labor, inventive works, uncooked supplies, and the prefer to gasoline their ambition and enrich these on the prime of the ladder. “I’ve discovered just one metaphor that encapsulates the character of what these AI energy gamers are: empires,” she writes.
“In the course of the lengthy period of European colonialism, empires seized and extracted sources that weren’t their very own and exploited the labor of the individuals they subjugated to mine, domesticate, and refine these sources for the empires’ enrichment.” She goes on to chronicle her personal rising disillusionment with the business. “With growing readability,” she writes, “I noticed that the very revolution promising to convey a greater future was as a substitute, for individuals on the margins of society, reviving the darkest remnants of the previous.”
To doc this, Hao steps away from her desk and goes out into the world to see the results of this empire because it sprawls throughout the planet. She travels to Colombia to satisfy with knowledge labelers tasked with instructing AI what numerous photos present, one in every of whom she describes sprinting again to her condo for the possibility to make a number of {dollars}. She paperwork how employees in Kenya who carried out data-labeling content material moderation for OpenAI got here away traumatized by seeing a lot disturbing materials. In Chile she paperwork how the business extracts treasured sources—water, energy, copper, lithium—to construct out knowledge facilities.
