With that stated, Empire of AI is a robust work, bristling not solely with nice reporting but additionally with huge concepts. This comes throughout in service to 2 essential 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 want to create a safety-focused synthetic basic intelligence however as a substitute turned extra inquisitive about successful. This can be a story we’ve seen many occasions earlier than in Massive Tech. See Theranos, which was going to make diagnostics simpler, or Uber, which was based to interrupt the cartel of “Massive 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 all the time comes again to successful.
The second theme is extra advanced and varieties the ebook’s thesis about what Hao calls AI colonialism. The concept is that the big 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 wish to gasoline 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.
“Throughout the lengthy period of European colonialism, empires seized and extracted assets that weren’t their very own and exploited the labor of the folks they subjugated to mine, domesticate, and refine these assets for the empires’ enrichment.” She goes on to chronicle her personal rising disillusionment with the trade. “With rising 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 fulfill with knowledge labelers tasked with instructing AI what varied photos present, considered one of whom she describes sprinting again to her house for the prospect 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 trade extracts valuable assets—water, energy, copper, lithium—to construct out knowledge facilities.
