Empire of AI

What should we be doing in the face of the rise of a new sort of intelligence? Can there be such a thing as an ethical AI? And in what cases is it best to think of AI as a baby? Yuval Noah Harari joins Poppy Harlow at the ‪@WSJNews‬ Leadership Institute to examine the role of AI in business and decision-making, how the AI revolution is like the Industrial Revolution, and what such revolutions mean for our jobs. Recorded on June 21, 2025 as part of the WSJ's CEO Council in London..

On June 6, 2025, PBS News Weekend reporter Ali Rogin interviewed Karen Hao about her new book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI released May 20, 2025, investigating OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

Hao says: "Many, many different types of AI technologies are hugely beneficial - task-specific models that are meant to target solving a specific, well-scoped challenge -like integrating renewable energy into the grid, weather prediction, drug discovery, health care, where you identify cancer earlier on in an MRI scan," but...

"The threat is when we reach an age where people at the top can just do whatever they want, develop this technology however they want, deploy it however they want, and potentially lead to mass environmental consequences, mass economic consequences, huge amounts of job loss." ~ Karen Hao

Wikipedia says Hao's book "focuses on the history of OpenAI and its culture of secrecy and devotion to the promise of artificial general intelligence (AGI). It includes interviews with around 260 people, correspondence, and relevant documents. Hao visited OpenAI's offices and covered the company for the MIT Technology Review two years before ChatGPT was released. Her experience there and reporting on topics of AI for seven years led her to write Empire Of AI."

The book's title refers to the colonial empires of the 1800s. "What we are seeing in the real world right now is that this particular AI paradigm is creating an enormous consolidation of economic and political power in the hands of these companies. "Empire of AI" is a nod to the argument that these companies need to be thought of as new forms of empire because they are laying claim to extraordinary historic levels of resources. They are exploiting an extraordinary amount of labor, they are monopolizing knowledge production."

"Most of the people in the world are going to feel this loss of agency in determining their own future. And when people do not feel that they have a voice to self-determine, democracy dies. So the greatest threat is to democracy."

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AGI refers to a theoretical pinnacle of AI research: a piece of software that has just as much sophistication, agility, and creativity as the human mind to match or exceed its performance on most (economically valuable) tasks.