In Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, investigative tech-journalist Karen Hao shines the light deep into the inner workings of the capitalists in Silicon Valley. She focuses specifically on OpenAI and its wannabe prophet, Sam Altman. It’s a story we now know well of egocentric tech capitalists whose wealth enables them to think they know better than everyone else, and who are in an incestuous type of personal competition with each other. It’s also a billion-dollar economic competition with those around them that is affecting the globe. Hao shows how, in order to win their competitions with each other, they must do what all capitalists must do if they want to continue their businesses, keep and grow their market share, and keep their rate of profit high: they must constantly “scale up.”
Although she tells that side of the story well and in great detail, she doesn’t just leave it at that. Hao expands our view outward to show in painful detail the effects of the tech capitalists’ actions on the things and people that they exploit. The objects of their exploitation include the environment and planet and its natural resources. She describes how “scaling” will use almost unfathomable amounts of water, energy and minerals. The vast needs to keep the level of “compute” (their word for computing infrastructure needed for AI development) growing and functioning will without question pit the needs of the computers against OUR needs. They will take and use up the very resources we need to survive.
She also describes the harms done to the human beings who are desperate, super-exploited, and completely expendable to these corporations. Some of the most painful portions of the book describe the desperate lives of these workers, coerced by the forces of capitalist relations in their own lives and countries to work for Scale and other gig companies like it. They are gaslighted by Silicon Valley rhetoric, traumatized by the work itself, then blacklisted as a mass when they’re no longer cost-effective.
The same capitalists who claimed for a year or two to practice “effective altruism” are the same people who walk past homeless camps in San Francisco and who pillage the minute-by-minute labor and corrode the emotional well-being of workers in Venezuela and Kenya. The planet and the people they exploit are merely “externalities” and barely given a real thought.
And in case we have bought into the usual rhetoric of Altman and other Silicon Valley propagandists that their companies are some sort of “scrappy start-ups” taking on the big boys, think again. Hao makes clear that OpenAI would have been nothing without the big bucks of Microsoft. It took billions from Microsoft in order to finance the “compute” that OpenAI needs and uses. All of this, she describes, has been and is being financed by the true giants of the tech world: Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta. So called “scrappy start-ups” don’t survive without the patronage of the true ruling class within the tech world.
She even addresses the issues of race in tech, and how many women and most Black employees are disregarded by the leading players, even if they’re highly qualified and brilliant. She also shows how the scaling up of AI training actually makes the systems more likely to show bias, racism, bigotry, hatred, etc. In other words, as the millions of corrosive elements on the capitalist internet are training AI models, those models progressively intake and take on more and more of those horrible tendencies.
And finally, but perhaps most important, she connects the trends in the capitalist world today to longer historical trends. She describes today’s tech companies as modern day colonial projects shaping a modern day colonial world. She says:
The empires of AI are not engaged in the same overt violence and brutality that marked this [earlier] history. But they, too, seize and extract precious resources to feed their vision of artificial intelligence: the work of artists and writers; the data of countless individuals posting about their experiences and observations online; the land, energy, and water required to house and run massive data centers and supercomputers. So too do the new empires exploit the labor of people globally to clean, tabulate, and prepare that data for spinning into lucrative AI technologies. They project tantalizing ideas of modernity and posture aggressively about the need to defeat other empires to provide cover for, and to fuel invasions of privacy, theft, and the cataclysmic automation of large swaths of meaningful economic opportunities… Data is the last frontier of colonization…AI is just a land grab all over again.
This colonial land grab is of course driven by imperialism – which is capitalism at its most advanced stage, using the astronomical wealth of giant tech corporations to gobble up ever larger shares of the world’s wealth, resources and human labor in their never-ending pursuit of profit. Hao, although not a Marxist or socialist, shows clearly the logical yet almost insane drives of this system. She also effectively describes the charlatans who populate the system and sell it to the rest of us, and the price that the world and humanity pay to produce the profits these behemoth corporations are continuously pursuing.
