Karen Hao: The Dreams and Nightmares of OpenAI

Trailblazing AI journalist Karen Hao comes all the way from Hong Kong to San Francisco to discuss the issues raised in her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Hao tackles the hard-hitting questions many people are afraid to face about the disruptive power of artificial intelligence and the forces driving its rapid ascent.

A longtime AI insider with unparalleled access to OpenAI and its key players, Hao has spent years investigating the industry’s hidden costs—human, environmental, and geopolitical. As a journalist whose award-winning work has been cited by Congress and featured in leading publications such as The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and MIT Technology Review, she has become one of the most authoritative voices on AI today.

Now Hao pulls back the curtain on the tech arms race reshaping our world in real time. From the breakneck rise of OpenAI and its Faustian bargain with Microsoft to the global supply chains powering AI’s insatiable appetite for data, energy and human labor, she reveals the staggering scale of the industry’s ambitions—and its consequences. With exclusive behind-the-scenes insights, including the dramatic firing and reinstatement of Sam Altman (a highly public corporate drama that began just days after Altman talked AI ethics on the Commonwealth Club stage), Hao will discuss not just a corporate saga but a crucial examination of the future of power, technology and society itself.

Join us for this urgent and thought-provoking conversation about the past, present, and future of AI—what’s at stake, who stands to gain, and who is being left behind.

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Commonwealth Club World Affairs is a public forum. Any views expressed in our programs are those of the speakers and not of Commonwealth Club World Affairs.

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