With that mentioned, Empire of AI is a robust work, bristling not solely with nice reporting but additionally with large concepts. This comes throughout in service to 2 important themes.
The primary is straightforward: 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 need to create a safety-focused synthetic common intelligence however as a substitute turned extra thinking about profitable. 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 may be Google, which went from “Don’t be evil” to (at the 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 client product on account of an abundance of warning, to speeding 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 profitable.
The second theme is extra advanced and types the guide’s thesis about what Hao calls AI colonialism. The thought is that the big AI firms act like conventional empires, siphoning wealth from the underside rungs of society within the types of labor, artistic works, uncooked supplies, and the prefer to gas their ambition and enrich these on the high of the ladder. “I’ve discovered just one metaphor that encapsulates the character of what these AI energy gamers are: empires,” she writes.
“Through the lengthy period of European colonialism, empires seized and extracted sources that weren’t their very own and exploited the labor of the folks they subjugated to mine, domesticate, and refine these sources for the empires’ enrichment.” She goes on to chronicle her personal rising disillusionment with the trade. “With growing readability,” she writes, “I noticed that the very revolution promising to carry a greater future was as a substitute, for folks 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 consequences of this empire because it sprawls throughout the planet. She travels to Colombia to satisfy with information labelers tasked with instructing AI what numerous pictures present, one in all whom she describes sprinting again to her residence for the possibility to make just a few {dollars}. She paperwork how staff 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 trade extracts valuable sources—water, energy, copper, lithium—to construct out information facilities.
