just finished listening to the audiobook “Empire of AI” by Karen Hao (wrapped it up on December 30, 2025), and I have to tell you, if you still think OpenAI is just a bunch of benevolent geniuses trying to save the world, you need to grab this book. Although the book focuses on OpenAI, this can probably be subsituted by any of the other major AI companies out there today.
Hao’s central metaphor is absolutely spot-on. She argues that OpenAI operates exactly like the old empires of history. It plunders resources (our data), exploits cheap labor from around the world, and drains natural resources from vulnerable countries, all to centralize power and wealth for a few chosen ones in Silicon Valley.
What really struck me was how quickly their mission took a U-turn. Remember when OpenAI started as a non-profit designed to fight the “evil” of Google’s DeepMind and protect humanity? Yeah, well, that didn’t last. As soon as Sam Altman and the leadership realized that compute costs billions, the “open” part of the name turned into a lie. They took a $10 billion investment from Microsoft, locked down their research, and basically morphed into the very thing they promised to destroy.
Then you have the “heroes” of the story, who come off as deeply flawed. Sam Altman doesn’t seem like a tech visionary here so much as a “steezy” politician and salesman. He apparently has a Napoleon complex (literally admiring the, self-proclaimed, emperor) and comes across as manipulative. The story of him getting fired by his own board via Google Meet while he was watching F1 in Vegas is something movies are made of. Then there’s Greg Brockman, a workaholic who treats the company like a cult. He just wants to be remembered at any cost. And Ilya Sutskever? He’s the “cerebral” genius who drank his own Kool-Aid with the mantra “Feel the AGI,” only to realize way too late that safety had taken a backseat to profit.
But honestly, the darkest part of the book is about how the “magic” is made. It is built on human suffering. Hao exposes how OpenAI outsourced the horrific job of filtering toxic content like violence and CSAM to workers in Kenya via a company called Sama. These people were left with severe PTSD. They also exploited desperate, highly educated Venezuelan workers for data annotation, paying them pennies.
It isn’t just human exploitation either. It’s environmental. In the race for compute power, they (along with Microsoft since OpenAI are using Azure services) are draining water in drought-stricken places like Chile and Uruguay just to cool their massive data centers. It is classic imperialism. They extract value from the weak to empower the strong.
The book ends with a warning that really stuck out. The only way to stop this empire is to decentralize it. We need to stop handing over our data and start supporting independent, transparent research. We can’t underestimate the power of the people, but as I noted while reading, we need to get off our asses and actually do something about it. If you care about privacy, labor rights, or just want to know who is pulling the strings behind the curtain, you should pick this one up for sure.
#Books #KarenHao #EmpireOfAI #OpenAI