AI’s Imperial Agenda |
After OpenAI CEO Sam Altman launched ChatGPT in 2022, the race for dominance in the field of artificial intelligence hit warp speed. Silicon Valley has poured billions of dollars into developing AI, building data centers, and promising a future free from the chains of unfulfilling work across the globe.
But in “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI,” tech reporter Karen Hao pulls back the curtain, unveiling the human and environmental cost of artificial intelligence and the colonial ambitions undergirding Silicon Valley’s efforts to fuel the rise of AI.
This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks to Hao about her book and the dawn of the AI empire. “Empires similarly consolidate a lot of economic might by exploiting extraordinary amounts of labor and not actually paying that labor sufficiently or at all,” says Hao. “So that’s how they are able to amass wealth — because they’re not actually distributing it.”
“The speed at which they’re constructing the infrastructure for training and deploying their AI models” is what shocks Hao the most, as “this infrastructure is actually not technically necessary, and … somehow the companies have effectively convinced the public and governments that it is. And therefore there’s been a lot of complicity in allowing these companies to continue building these projects.”
“They have effectively been able to use this narrative of [artificial general intelligence] to accrue more capital, land, energy, water, data. They’ve been able to accrue more resources — and critical resources — than pretty much anyone in history,” Hao says, warning of “the complete aggressive and reckless” growth of AI infrastructure, but stresses that none of this is inevitable. “There is a very clear path for how to unlock the benefits of AI without accepting the colossal cost of it.”
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington.
In 2022, Sam Altman’s company OpenAI launched ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that unleashed a wave of excitement over artificial intelligence. And it kickstarted a race for dominance in the field.
Tech CEOs from Altman at OpenAI, to Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, and Alex Karp at Palantir have lauded artificial intelligence as the “future” of humanity.
During a New York Times New Work Summit in 2019, years ahead of Open AI’s launch of ChatGPT, Altman predicted that artificial intelligence could “eliminate poverty.”
Sam Altman: It can be great, we have the potential to eliminate poverty, solve climate change, cure a huge amount of human disease, like educate everyone in the world phenomenally well.
JW: In a more recent CNBC interview, Palantir CEO Alex Karp claimed that AI made the United States the “dominant country in the world”:
Alex Karp: AI makes America the dominant country in the world. So just start there. Every other country in the world — like, I spent half my life in Europe — they’re whining and crying. We have the right chips. We have the right software. We have the right engineers. We have the right culture. We have the right people.
JW: And in a video posted to Facebook, unveiling Meta’s new AI research lab in July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised to develop personal “superintelligence” that would free its users to focus on what truly matters.
Mark Zuckerberg: Advances in technology have freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits that we choose. And at each step along the way, most people have decided to use their newfound productivity to spend more time on creativity, culture, relationships, and just enjoying life. And I expect superintelligence to accelerate this trend even more.
JW: Only — what if these utopic visions mask a far, darker reality?
In “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI,” Karen Hao exposes the underlying reality of the lofty promises made by Sam Altman and the tech industry. Hao reveals the human toll of artificial intelligence from its extreme water usage, to its exploitation of data laborers, to AI companies’ disturbing resemblance to the colonial empires that ravaged the planet for centuries.
Joining me now to discuss “Empire of AI” and Silicon Valley’s grip on our world is Karen Hao.
Karen, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Karen Hao: Thank you so much for having me, Jessica.
JW: Before we begin, we should start off by mentioning that The Intercept is a party in a lawsuit against OpenAI for allegedly using copyrighted materials to train ChatGPT.
So, Karen, of all of the tech CEOs in the artificial intelligence rat race to profile, why Sam Altman, and why OpenAI?
KH: So I actually didn’t set out to write an OpenAI book. I was trying to write a book about these parallels that I had been documenting for several years between the AI industry and colonialism. And I realized as I was putting together that idea, that in order to really illustrate how every single thing that we know about AI today in the public consciousness, like I had to trace the history of OpenAI, because those decisions were made within that company.
So the fact that we associate AI in the public with large language models with ChatGPT, with these colossally consumptive technologies that need massive amount of data, massive amounts of data centers — those were all because OpenAI made certain choices. And Sam Altman was at the helm of the company when it made many of those choices. So yeah, it really is, I would say the book is not just a history of Open AI, it’s really a history of the modern-day AI boom.
JW: As you’ve alluded to in the book, you masterfully, in my opinion, weave the promises of Silicon Valley against the backdrop of its impact on the communities that host its data centers and feed other parts of the AI machine. What made you want to tell these two stories alongside each other, instead of just a tech book, or instead of just a book about the impact?
KH: I’ve always felt that the most important questions on people’s minds about technology or about AI is just: How is it going to affect their lives? And the only way to really tell that story is to ground it in the experiences of people that have already been affected by the development of the technology, because they are the canaries in the coal mines, so to speak, of how the rest of the world is going to experience it.
And if you only tell the story from the perspective of San Francisco and from the tech companies themselves and the elites that run the companies at the top, you’re largely going to get a story about the technology working because it’s designed by these people for these people.
But that’s not actually the real, full scope of the story. And so philosophically, in a lot of my reporting even before the book, I always believe that you really start to see where things fall apart when you go furthest away from Silicon Valley to the places that work fundamentally differently from SF, from the U.S., with people speaking fundamentally different languages who look different, who have a different history and culture.
And that is actually more indicative of how the average person is going to ultimately be impacted by this technology because San Francisco’s a really weird place. It’s an extreme bubble. There’s an extraordinary amount of wealth that is pretty much not replicated anywhere else in the world. There’s an incredible amount of homogeneity.
And so that’s why I wanted to interweave both the inside story and the ideology of these people and the decisions and the context in which they make these decisions, but then quickly expand to the far reaches of the empire, as I call it, to document really how it’s going to affect the vast majority of the world.
JW: Yeah, I want to dive into the empire of it all. So the obvious through line of your book is colonialism and the ways in which these AI companies and tech companies have resembled these colonial empires of old. And I’m curious, how do you see the comparisons and where do they differ?
KH: Yeah, I mean, there’s honestly so many comparisons. But I really focus on four in the book. The first one is that empires, they consolidate an extraordinary amount of wealth and power in part by just taking a lot of resources that are not their own. That refers to the intellectual property — as The Intercept knows well — that they take to just train their models without any creditor compensation. That’s also taking the private data of people that they might leave in places like a Flickr photo album that they never realized could get hoovered up into these image generation tools.
Also, second parallel: Empires similarly consolidate a lot of economic might by exploiting extraordinary amounts of labor and not actually paying that labor sufficiently or at all. So that’s how they are able to amass wealth — because they’re not actually distributing it. And I talk in my book extensively about the ways that the industry does exactly the same thing with workers in Kenya or [who are] in crisis in Venezuela,........