Karen Hao: Author of Empire of AI on Why "Scale at All Costs" is Not Leading Us to a Good Place

(0:00) Intro 

(1:49) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel

(2:36) Introduction by Professor Anat Admati, Stanford Graduate School of Business. Read the event coverage from Stanford's CASI.

(4:14) Start of Interview

(4:45) What inspired Karen to write this book and how she got started with journalism.

(8:00) OpenAI's Nonprofit Origin Story

(8:45) Sam Altman and Elon Musk's Collaboration

(10:39) The Shift to For-Profit

(12:12) On the original split between Musk and Altman over control of OpenAI

(14:36) The Concept of AI Empires

(18:04) About concept of "benefit to humanity" and OpenAI's mission "to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity"

(20:30) On Sam Altman's Ouster and OpenAI's Boardroom Drama (Nov 2023) "Doomers vs Boomers"

(26:05) Investor Dynamics Post-Ouster of Sam Altman

(28:21) Prominent Departures from OpenAI (ie Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, Ilya Sutskever, Mira Murati, etc)

(30:55) The Geopolitics of AI: U.S. vs. China

(32:37) The "What about China" Card used by US companies to ward off regulation.

(34:26) "Scaling at All Costs is not leading us in a good place"

(36:46) Karen's preference on ethical AI development "I really want there to be more participatory AI development. And I think about the full supply chain of AI development when I say that."

(39:53) Her biggest hope and fear for the future "the greatest threat of these AI empires is the erosion of democracy."

(43:34) The case of Chilean Community Activism and Empowerment

(47:20) Recreating human intelligence and the example of Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT (Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976)

(51:15) OpenAI's current AI research capabilities: "I think it's asymptotic because they have started tapping out of their scaling paradigm"

(53:26) The state (and importance of) open source development of AI. "We need things to be more open"

(55:08) The Bill Gates demo on chatGPT acing the AP Biology test.

(58:54) Funding academic AI research and the public policy question on the role of Government.

(1:01:11) Recommendations for Startups and Universities

Karen Hao is the author of Empire of AI (Penguin Press, May 2025) and an award-winning journalist covering the intersections of AI & society.

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Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License