Note from the editor:

« From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman’s OpenAI, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy. When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined in its mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong? Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this vastly disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources : the « compute » power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive LLMs, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans « cleaning up » that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and the truly alarming usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire : only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its breakthrough ChatGPT, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?… »