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Empire of AI

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What to expect

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

Critics Review

A gripping new account of the battle for AI supremacy… tense and absorbing
Guardian
A veteran AI reporter, Hao’s more detailed account of OpenAI’s progress... doesn't pull any punches
Financial Times
Excellent and deeply reported
New York Times
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
New Yorker
Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us
Vulture
Deeply researched, gripping
Economist
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
Financial Times Best Book of 2025: Business
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
TIME Magazine, “TIME100 AI 2025”
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

User Reviews

Book 4.8
Narration 4.8
Author Karen Hao
Narrator Karen Hao
Duration 17 hours and 50 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781837311262
Format Audiobook
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Genre Artificial intelligence, Business ethics and social responsibility, Digital and information technologies: social and ethical aspects, Environmental science, engineering and technology, Ethical issues: scientific, technological and medical developments, Impact of science and technology on society, Popular science
Availability AU, GB, IE
Rating
4.8 (5 reviews)
Narration
4.8 (5 reviews)

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