Thinking On Paper Inside the Empire of AI: OpenAI and the New Power Structure | Karen Hao Book Review (Part 1)
The story of OpenAI isn’t about invention, it’s about consolidation of power. It's about ego, silicon valley and a small group of tech billionaires controlling artificial intelligence. The question you have to ask though: is it for humanity, or it is for them?
It's Book Club time. And Mark and Jeremy are reading Karen Hao’s Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. The opening chapters trace how a nonprofit founded “for the good of humanity” became one of the most powerful private empires in history. Through internal memos, lawsuits, and leaked correspondence, Hao reveals the transformation of idealism into infrastructure, and how moral language was replaced by market logic.
What began as an open challenge to Big Tech became its successor. As empires always do, it centralized power, redefined trust, and built belief into a business model. From the God complex of its founders to the quiet complicity of investors and governments, Empire of AI examines what happens when intelligence itself becomes property, and whether the tools built for humanity can ever truly belong to it.
Please enjoy the show.
Stay disruptive. Be curious, Keep Thinking on Paper.
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Chapters
(00:00) Introduction to Empire of AI
(01:54) The Empire Strikes Back
(05:13) Karen Hao, The Journalist
(07:38) Do You Trust Open AI?
(10:18) Why OpenAI Made ChatGPT
(11:47) Scaling OpenAI
(12:33) Google, Deep Mind and Ai For humanity
(15:12) Greg Brockman
(17:02) Sam Altman's Personal Brand 24:46 Timnit Gebru
(25:25) How does AI benefit humanity?
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