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Empire of AI

Inside the reckless race for total domination

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Empire of AI

By: Karen Hao
Narrated by: Karen Hao
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

An eye-opening account of the tech arms race shaping out planet, from an award-winning journalist and AI insider to the world of Sam Altman and OpenAI
When longtime AI expert and journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, it was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely market forces.
But the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that it requires an unprecedented amount of proprietary resources: the ‘compute’ power of scarce high-end chips, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans on the ground ‘cleaning it up’ for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the need for energy and water underlying everything. We have entered a new, ominous age of empire with OpenAI setting a breakneck pace, as a small group of the most valuable companies in human history try to chase it down.
In exhilarating prose and with unparalleled access to those closest to Sam Altman, Hao recounts the meteoric rise of OpenAI and shows us the sinister impact that this industry is having on society.

© Karen Hao 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Best of 2025 Business Ethics Computer Science Environment History & Culture Machine Theory & Artificial Intelligence Science Technology & Society Workplace & Organisational Behavior

Critic reviews

A gripping new account of the battle for AI supremacy… tense and absorbing (Emine Saner)
A veteran AI reporter, Hao’s more detailed account of OpenAI’s progress... doesn't pull any punches (Richard Waters)
Excellent and deeply reported (Tim Wu)
Hao’s reporting inside OpenAI is exceptional, and she’s persuasive in her argument that the public should focus less on A.I.’s putative ‘sentience’ and more on its implications for labor and the environment (Benjamin Wallace-Wells)
Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us
Deeply researched, gripping
Hao pulls no punches in describing the building of one of the biggest names in generative AI, focusing her account on the dysfunctional, combative leadership approach of co-founder Sam Altman. She details how his apocalyptic predictions and messianic rhetoric attracted devoted disciples to his cause (Andrew Hill)
A bestselling page-turner that has made waves not just in Silicon Valley but around the world . . . With Empire of AI, Hao is fundamentally shaping many people’s perceptions and understanding of the company at the center of the AI revolution
An epic exposé that pulls back the curtain on the egos and uneasy compromises behind the rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's full of dark details, some of them bordering on absurd, that shows how much of the AI boom runs on secrecy and is driven by questionable ideologies. This book serves as a warning about the price we all pay when AI builders who dreamed of utopia got swept up in a race to build empires instead (Parmy Olson, Bloomberg columnist and author of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World )
Our lives are about to be remade by artificial intelligence—or to be more accurate, by a few companies run by a few very self-confident people. If you ever wondered whether all of this is inevitable, whether to believe all the promises of tech luminaries, whether we could save a little bit of our democracy in the age of AI, then read this book! (Daron Acemoglu, recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences)
All stars
Most relevant
A thought-provoking and informative book, superbly read by Karen Hao. I would highly recommend listening to this.

Empire of AI

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really enjoyed this book though it makes you worry about the future and fear the moral bankruptcy of all those guys who are worshipped by politicians and investors. However did not like the narration, wished the author had left that to someone else

very well researched

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Het boek is een sterke waarschuwingsanalyse: AI-ontwikkeling is geen neutrale technologische vooruitgang, maar een machts- en schaalrace met reële geopolitieke, sociaaleconomische en milieu-gevolgen.

Het geeft niet alleen een technisch overzicht van AI en LLM’s, belicht ook maatschappelijke, ethische en geopolitieke dimensies.

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Just like Careless People and Hubris Maximus, this book shows exactly how rotten, messy, and money driven the tech and Ai industry has become... An important and indispensable read for anyone and everyone, since we'll all be affected by this development

Important and scary AF

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I highy recommend this title, I didn't know when picking it up that it's a result of years long dedicated investigative work of Karen Hao. it's so illuminating and at times reads like a crime novel. I loved all n-teen hours of this audiobook

a hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism

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