The OpenAI Empire
The Guardian
SKIPPED
Details
- Date Published
- 28 May 2025
- Priority Score
- 3
- Australian
- No
- Created
- 29 May 2025, 06:38 pm
Description
Technology journalist Karen Hao, who has been reporting on OpenAI since 2019, compares the company’s unprecedented growth to a new form of empire
Summary
The podcast evaluates OpenAI's transformation from a transparent non-profit to a powerful corporation likened to an empire. Karen Hao, a technology journalist, offers insights from her extensive coverage of OpenAI, highlighting its growth while implicating ethical concerns with transparency and social impact. The discussion revolves around OpenAI's shift to a 'growth-at-all-costs' ethos, raising questions about its societal costs and implications for AI governance. Although the podcast critiques OpenAI's practices and their effects, it does not deeply engage with specific existential or catastrophic AI risks, remaining focused on corporate and operational aspects.
Body
The OpenAI empire - podcast00:00:0000:00:00Technology journalist Karen Hao, who has been reporting on OpenAI since 2019, compares the company’s unprecedented growth to a new form of empireIn 2019, before most of the world had heard of the company, the technology journalistKaren Haospent three days embedded in the offices of OpenAI.What she saw, she tellsMichael Safi, was a company vastly at odds with its public image: that of a transparent non-profit developing artificial intelligence technology purely for the benefit of humanity. “They said that they were transparent. They said that they were collaborative. They were actually very secretive.”Hao spent the next five years following the growth of OpenAI, as it shifted to pursue – in her words – a growth-at-all-costs model. On the one hand, it has been spectacularly successful, with OpenAI now one of the largest companies in the world. On the other, she argues, it has come at a severe cost – to the people whose labour it relies on to operate, and to the planet.In fact, as she describes in her new book, Empire of AI: Inside the reckless race for total domination, it makes sense to think of OpenAI not as a company, but more akin to empires of old.Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/ReutersExplore more on these topicsArtificial intelligence (AI)Today in FocusSam Altman