At the center of every empire is an ideology, a belief system that propels the system forward and justifies expansion – even if the cost of that expansion directly defies the ideology’s stated mission.
For European colonial powers, it was Christianity and the promise of saving souls while extracting resources. For today’s AI empire, it’s artificial general intelligence to “benefit all humanity.” And OpenAI is its chief evangelist, spreading zeal across the industry in a way that has reframed how AI is built.
“I was interviewing people whose voices were shaking from the fervor of their beliefs in AGI,” Karen Hao, journalist and bestselling author of “Empire of AI,” told TechCrunch on a recent episode of Equity.
In her book, Hao likens the AI industry in general, and OpenAI in particular, to an empire.
“The only way to really understand the scope and scale of OpenAI’s behavior…is actually to recognize that they’ve already grown more powerful than pretty much any nation state in the world, and they’ve consolidated an extraordinary amount of not just economic power, but also political power,” Hao said. “They’re terraforming the Earth. They’re rewiring our geopolitics, all of our lives. And so you can only describe it as an empire.”
OpenAI has described AGI as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work,” one that will somehow “elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility.”
These nebulous promises have fueled the industry’s exponential growth — its massive resource demands, oceans of scraped data, strained energy grids, and willingness to release untested systems into the world. All in service of a future that many experts say may never arrive.
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Hao says this path wasn’t inevitable, and that scaling isn’t the only w …