Karen Hao

We need to break up the empires of AI.

You know, I've been covering the tech industry for over eight years, interviewed over 250 people, including former or current OpenAI employees and executives.

And I can tell you that there are many parallels between the empires of AI and the empires of old.

Like, they claimed the intellectual property of artists, writers, and creators in the pursuit of training these models.

Second, they exploit an extraordinary amount of labor, which breaks the career ladder.

because someone gets laid off and then they work to train the models on the very job that they were just laid off in, which will then perpetuate more layoffs if that model then develops that skill.

And when they talk about that there's going to be some new jobs created that we can't even imagine, a lot of the jobs that are created are way worse than the jobs that were there.

And then there's the environmental and public health crisis that these companies have created.

and how they're able to also spend hundreds of millions to try and kill every possible piece of legislation that gets in their way and will censor researchers that are inconvenient to the empire's agenda.

But what I'm saying is not that these technologies don't have utility, it's that the production of these technologies right now is exacting a lot of harm on people.

But we have research that shows that the very same capabilities could be developed in a different way that doesn't have all of these unintended consequences.

So let's talk about all of that.

I took a strange route into journalism.

I studied mechanical engineering at MIT.

And so when I graduated, I moved to San Francisco.

I joined a tech startup.

I became part of Silicon Valley.

And I basically received an education in what Silicon Valley is about because a few months into joining a very mission-driven startup that was focused on building technologies that would help people,

facilitate the fight against climate change, the board fired the CEO because the company was not profitable.

And this was, in hindsight, a very pivotal moment for me because I thought if this hub is ultimately geared towards building profitable technologies, and many of the problems in the world that I think need solved are not profitable problems like climate change, then