E-book excerpt: “Empire of AI” by Karen Hao
Penguin Press
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Tech journalist Karen Hao’s new ebook, “Empire of AI: Goals and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI” (printed by Penguin Press), examines the Silicon Valley billionaire and his advocacy of synthetic intelligence, which tech entrepreneur Elon Musk himself has known as the “greatest existential menace” to humanity. [Musk has simultaneously promoted his own artificial intelligence company, xAI, and chatbot, Grok.]
Learn an excerpt beneath.
“Empire of AI” by Karen Hao
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Chapter 1
Divine Proper
Everybody else had arrived, however Elon Musk was late as normal. It was the summer season of 2015, and a bunch of males had gathered for a personal dinner at Sam Altman’s invitation to debate the way forward for AI and humanity.
Musk had met Altman, fourteen years his junior, some time earlier and had shaped impression. President of the famed Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, Altman’s popularity preceded him. After beginning his first firm at age nineteen, he had quickly established himself inside Silicon Valley as an excellent strategist and dealmaker with grand ambitions, even for the land of massive‑pondering founders. Musk discovered him to be sensible, pushed, and, most essential, somebody who espoused like‑minded views on the necessity to rigorously develop and govern synthetic intelligence. It was as if, Musk would describe in a lawsuit years later, Altman had mirrored every thing Musk had ever mentioned concerning the topic to win his belief.
For Altman’s half, he typically mentioned that Musk had been a childhood hero. After the older entrepreneur had proven him across the sprawling SpaceX manufacturing unit in Hawthorne, California, that admiration had solely deepened. “The factor that sticks in reminiscence was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending massive rockets to Mars,” Altman wrote later of the expertise. “I left pondering ‘huh, so that is the benchmark for what conviction seems to be like.'”
Musk had been deeply involved about AI for a while. In 2012, he’d met Demis Hassabis, the professorial CEO of the London‑primarily based AI lab DeepMind Applied sciences. Shortly thereafter, Hassabis had additionally paid Musk a go to at his SpaceX manufacturing unit. As the 2 males sat within the canteen, surrounded by the sounds of huge rocket components being transported and assembled, Hassabis raised the chance that extra superior AI, of the type which may someday exceed human intelligence, may pose a menace to humanity. What’s extra, Musk’s fail‑secure of colonizing Mars to flee wouldn’t work on this situation. Superintelligence, Hassabis mentioned with amusement, would merely observe people into the galaxy. Musk, decidedly much less amused, invested $5 million in DeepMind to maintain tabs on the corporate.
Later, at his 2013 celebration within the lush wine‑rising landscapes of Napa Valley, Musk had gotten right into a heated and emotional debate together with his longtime good friend and Google cofounder Larry Web page over whether or not AI surpassing human intelligence was in reality an issue. Web page did not suppose so, calling it the subsequent stage of evolution. When Musk balked, Web page accused him of being a “specist,” discriminating in opposition to nonhuman species.
After that, Musk started to talk incessantly concerning the existential threat of AI. At an MIT symposium, he described AI as most likely the “greatest existential menace” to humanity and its improvement as “summoning the demon.” He met with publishers in New York, gripped by the considered writing his personal ebook about extinction‑degree threats, together with AI. Later, at a recurring AI Salon occasion at Stanford, a younger researcher named Timnit Gebru would come as much as him after a chat and ask him why he was so obsessive about AI when the specter of local weather change was extra clearly existential. “Local weather change is unhealthy, but it surely’s not going to kill everybody,” he mentioned. “AI may render humanity extinct.”
From “Empire of AI: Goals and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI” by Karen Hao, printed by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random Home, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Karen Hao.
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