Empire of AI cover art

Empire of AI

Inside the reckless race for total domination

 Preview
Free with 30-day trial
Prime logo New to Audible Prime Member exclusive:
2 credits with free trial
1 credit a month to use on any title to download and keep
Listen to anything from the Plus Catalogue—thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and audiobooks
Download titles to your library and listen offline
₹199.00 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

Empire of AI

Written by: Karen Hao
Narrated by: Karen Hao
Free with 30-day trial

₹199.00 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for ₹842.13

Buy Now for ₹842.13

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

 Business Ethics Computer Science Environment History & Culture Science Workplace & Organisational Behaviour
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c

Critic Reviews

A gripping new account of the battle for AI supremacy… tense and absorbing (Emine Saner)
A veteran AI reporter, Hao’s more detailed account of OpenAI’s progress... doesn't pull any punches (Richard Waters)
Excellent and deeply reported (Tim Wu)
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 (Benjamin Wallace-Wells)
Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us
Deeply researched, gripping
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 (Andrew Hill)
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
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)
All stars
Most relevant
Loved the detailed approach of story telling which covers the boons and banes of AI. Understood a lot of areas hitherto unknown!

An excellent and comprehensive overview of all aspects of the impact of AI

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Please read/listen to this before you start using AI responsibly. Thank you Karen Hao for this perspective and insight to the world of AI.

Amazing Insight (AI)

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It's the best book I have read on Generative AI and beginnings of Chatgpt to the current state. I think other books cover the story in broader strokes. There are 2 different threads that run through the AI world, google deepmind and Open AI. Each story has its own set of fascinating leaps in the AI Industry. This book focuses on the rise of open AI and the subsequent challenges they face. There are a couple of chapters which I think can be edited better or reduced which is a deep dive into sam altman's behaviour, it is a narrative thread needed to weave the broader story but the space given to it seems disproportionate in a industry which is now seeing the rise of xAI, Gemini, Anthropic, perplexity, SSI and Meta etc.

But all in all, its a brilliant book! and I would gladly recommend it to understand the Gen AI story.

Best book on Generative AI advancements

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Horrifying account of AI development. amazing book to understand inner workings of Silicon Valley. These people are just like others seeking power, money they are no different.

Good listen

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Karen does a great job in giving an inside view with thorough research. With all the events over last few years, getting an inside view provides context and help us understand how the main characters navigated the situation. She has amazing story telling skill and keeps it riveting.

Excellent research and story telling

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews