Karen Hao's new book is a skeptical look at Sam Altman and Elon Musk's AI empire
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Some of the world's greatest storytellers aren't authors, poets, filmmakers, or musicians. They're salesmen. This is a point that comes up in today's book, Empire of AI. It's written by journalist Karen Howe, and it's a deep look at open AI. It's a deep look at open AI.

That's the artificial intelligence company that started as a non-profit with the idea that you could develop AI for good. The company's CEO is Sam Altman, and he got there not by being an inventor or an engineer, as how tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. Altman holds status in the world of AI because he's a, quote, once-in-a-generation storytelling talent. That's coming up.

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We have a skeptical look at one of the most famous companies of our time. Karen Howe wrote it. She's a journalist who first covered open AI six years ago when it was promising to develop artificial intelligence ethically. It was founded as a research nonprofit meant to do this kind of fundamental research.

for, as it said, the benefit of all of humanity. And it was meant to open source that research to be for the public benefit. The word open was right there in the name. OpenAI had the backing of tech giants, including Elon Musk, who worried about AI's future effects on the world. So Karen Howe arranged to spend time in the company's offices as a young reporter for the MIT Technology Review.

Her experience led her to ask questions, which eventually led to a book called Empire of AI. It explores the company's research, its development of chat GPT, its firing and restoration of CEO Sam Altman, and more. They were incredibly secretive, which didn't seem quite right because, first of all, that's the opposite of transparent. But second of all, why would you be secretive if you're a nonprofit that's purely doing research on

in the interest of the public. You would be secretive if you might have some kind of commercial intent. Also, they were incredibly competitive. When I was interviewing executives, they really emphasized that they needed to be number one in AI progress. They needed to be first to what they called artificial general intelligence.

And to me, there was an inherent tension in wanting to be first and wanting to be open. To what extent were you able to trace some of these contradictions back to an important figure in the founding of OpenAI, his anxieties, his desires, Elon Musk? I think there were definitely elements of Elon Musk involved.

But there was also a lot of Sam Altman because they were the two co-founders of the organization. And actually, a lot of the contradictions of the organization when I started profiling it were also products of the disagreements between Musk and Altman. So they both agreed that they should control the development of AI. Ultimately, yes.

that was going to be what would result. And the best outcome for the world is if they are the ones that have their hands on this thing. Where they disagreed was who among the two of them should be the one with the ultimate power. So they clashed over who should be the CEO, who should lead the organization. I feel that you help me understand that this is more than a clash of personalities. You have people who are worried about the future of humanity, the future of the planet, and

And thinking we need to develop artificial intelligence in an ethical way. And that's why this should be a nonprofit. But we also need to be ahead of everybody else in order to shape things. And therefore, we need to be really good. And therefore, we need to get immense investment. And therefore, we need to attach for-profit motives to the nonprofit. I mean, they kind of reason themselves out of their own original idea.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think a lot of open AI and AI development in general is very much an ideological clash, not just personality clashes. Certainly there are huge personalities and they're all very egotistical and they all want to be the one that makes AI in their image. But there are these deep-seated kind of quasi-religious beliefs that also underpin the whole thing.

where some people believe that AI could have the potential to bring the world to utopia and they want to run as fast as possible to that objective. And other people believe that AI has the possibility to destroy humanity and they want to run fast,

to the finish line of building this powerful technology so that they're the ones that ensure that it's not another quote-unquote bad actor that is going to do it first and therefore lead to the demise of humanity. Who is Sam Altman and what did he bring to the table given that he himself was not an inventor or a brilliant engineer?

He's a once-in-a-generation fundraising talent. That is his particular skill. And he's also a once-in-a-generation storytelling talent, which is effectively why he's so good at fundraising. He is able to

to paint these extremely persuasive visions of the future. He was already prominent within Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley very much runs on stories and telling stories about the future. When he says something to someone, what he's saying is more tightly correlated with what he thinks they need to hear than what he actually believes or the ground truth of the thing.

He's able to say the things that really provoke people to kind of rally towards a general broad sweeping mission that he paints. Is this why his board briefly fired him in 2023, although they were forced to bring him back?

It very much has to do with that. There were two things that were happening. One was they didn't really trust what he was saying. But two goes back to this ideological clash that was happening and still happening within AI development. There are two kind of main factions within the AI world. There are the boomers and the doomers, the people who believe in utopia, AI bringing utopia, and the people believing AI will destroy humanity.

I think of them as two sides of the same coin in that ultimately both of them profess that they should be the one to control AI development for the good of humanity. But the board at the time was more leaning towards the Doomer ideology. Altman was more of a boomer?

The thing that's interesting about Altman is he, depending on who you talk to, they will say that he's a boomer or they'll say that he has doomer leanings. Throughout my reporting, I talked with a lot of people who worked either closely with him for years or not so closely with him. And regardless of where they sat...

how close they were and for how long they worked with him, no one could quite articulate exactly what Altman believes. And I think that is part of also the reason why the board ended up firing him is they just did not know what was behind

his words. I guess we should tell the other side of this story, which is very interesting, which is that Altman said, what are you talking about? I'm completely shocked. I've always told you the truth. And Microsoft, which had a huge, huge deal worth billions of dollars with OpenAI, ultimately reached out and said, if you get rid of Sam Altman, we're going to take Sam Altman. We're going to keep Sam Altman and dump you. Microsoft and Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, seemed to believe in Altman more than his company. Yeah.

I think ultimately we have to understand that there was a lot of capital at play in that decision. And when the board decided to fire Altman, OpenAI was in the middle of a tender offer that could have left some employees with millions of dollars. And without Altman, that tender offer would have gone away. Microsoft would have been left without Altman.

open AI anymore. And they had already pumped at that point $13 billion into the company. The kind of strategic maneuver that Nadella made was, well, let me say that I'll hire Altman to my company, but also create conditions for

that escalate the pressure enough that the board has to retract its decision. Because ultimately, the board, as much as they didn't want Altman to lead the company, they also didn't want the company to not exist. Has OpenAI remained the leader in artificial intelligence?

It's an interesting question because it depends on how you would measure it. In terms of name recognition, you could argue that they are the lead because most people have heard of ChatGPT.

Application developers are now moving towards a model where they are trying to make their platforms AI vendor agnostic. And so in terms of the actual capability of the technology, it seems like increasingly AI has become commoditized and open AI doesn't necessarily have a meaningful lead anymore. Is the United States still definitely the world leader in artificial intelligence?

It also really depends on what we consider to be leadership. Like, is the U.S. leading in democratic governance of AI systems? Absolutely not. We are currently in a situation where these companies have kind of free reign to do whatever they want with AI.

all of the data that they want with all of the land and the energy and the water that they want to build their data centers and without any democratic input from the broader population. So in terms of leadership in that regard, I think the U.S. has dramatically fallen behind. Can you tell me one more thing? You call the book Empire of AI and you make an extended comparison to old time colonial empires of the 1800s, say. What are you talking about?

We are essentially seeing the recreation of how empires of old used to work. Like empires of old, there were a small group of people at the top that were able to make decisions for everyone else around the world. And basically everyone else around the world didn't have agency, didn't have say, and they lived in the thrash of the decisions that were happening at the top based on the whims of the people at the top.

And we are now in basically the same situation. I mean, they are still exploiting lots of labor around the world in the sense that they are starting to apply real pressure to people's ability to receive economic opportunity by creating technologies that automate away a lot of work.

And they're also seizing up a lot of resources to continue fortifying their empire. They're seizing up land for their data centers. They're seizing up data that people put online without the realization that it would be used, it would be commoditized and used to turn a profit. And we have to be extremely cognizant because if we follow this path to its logical conclusion, democracy cannot survive anywhere.

in a world where the vast majority of people no longer have agency and say and control over their own lives. And you didn't even mention electricity, which is just a huger and huger and huger demand on the entire world because of this technology, right? Yeah, absolutely. The projections for the amount of energy that will need to be added to

to the grid in order to support the accelerating demand of data centers and supercomputers around the world is historic. It's unprecedented. Karen Howe is a journalist and the author of Empire of AI. Thanks so much. Thanks so much. This message comes from Thrive Market. The food industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, but not everything on the shelf is made with your health in mind.

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