MIT Technology Review compares two accounts of OpenAI’s power and ambition

MIT Technology Review compares two accounts of OpenAI’s power and ambition

Originally published on May 28, 2025, MIT Technology Review compares Karen Hao’s Empire of AI with Keach Hagey’s The Optimist as accounts of OpenAI and Sam Altman. The reviewer says Hao’s book argues that AI companies act like empires, extracting labor, creative work and natural resources while concentrating wealth and power. The review describes her reporting on data labelers in Colombia, content moderators in Kenya and resources used for data centers in Chile. It also highlights a Māori community’s small language model, trained on volunteers’ recordings and intended to serve the community, as an alternative to centralized development. The reviewer says Hao rejects the idea that AI’s broad benefits require surrendering privacy, agency, labor and art. The review presents Hagey’s book as a more direct business biography, focused on Altman’s ambition and personal life. It says Hagey offers a more nuanced account of family dynamics in disputed allegations that Altman and his family deny. The reviewer discloses being predisposed to favor Hao’s work because of her prior reporting for MIT Technology Review. The review’s larger argument is that the pursuit of winning can displace ethical aims. It closes by returning to the question of preserving AI models, with Altman’s response to Paul Graham’s question about GPT-4.

Publication: fe6c080d-38ef-f833-f389-ffc23b3abd3a

attribution — pass: The reading attributes the comparison and judgments to MIT Technology Review and the reviewer. It attributes the empire thesis and the rejection quote to Hao, and the business-biography focus to Hagey. Altman's 100-meter answer is presented as reported by the review. The text is a single review, not a listing; the Deep Dive sidebar is not used.

So you can take this as a kind of disclaimer that we are predisposed to look favorably on Hao’s work.

summary — pass: The summary names the actors and both books and explains the empire metaphor in plain terms. It covers the field reporting, the Māori small language model as an alternative, Hagey's angle, the disclosure, and the review's ambition-over-ethics theme. A general reader can follow it. The question asks about an unresolved issue that follows from the evidence. Omitting the Kenyan workers' trauma is a minor compression, not a distortion.

In Silicon Valley, no matter what one’s original intent, it always comes back to winning.

date — pass: May 28, 2025 matches the UTC day of originalPublished, 2025-05-28T10:07:09Z. The page was edited on 2025-06-12, but every cited passage is plainly part of the review body. The later Deep Dive sidebar items are neither used nor relied on. There is no hindsight framing, and the retrieval date is disclosed.

support — pass: Each source-stated claim matches its excerpt. The interpretation about unknown long-term benefits is labeled as Escape Meridian's reading and preserves the gap: the source says only that the model is 'meant to' benefit the community. The cited passages are plainly original review text despite the later edit. The disputed allegations are described with the family's denial.

Trained on volunteers’ voice recordings and running on just two graphics processing units, or GPUs, rather than the thousands employed by the likes of OpenAI, it’s meant to benefit the community, not exploit it.

media — pass: No media was selected and no verified candidates were supplied; a text-only reading is appropriate.