Karen Hao

then what are we actually doing here?

How did we get to a point where innovation is not actually necessarily working in the public benefit and sometimes even undermining the public benefit in pursuit of profit?

In that moment, I had...

a bit of a crisis where I thought, well, I just spent four years trying to set myself up for this career that I now don't think I am cut out for.

And I thought, well, I might as well just try something totally different.

I've

And that's how, after two years, I landed at a role at MIT Technology Review covering AI full-time.

And that gave me a space to then explore all of these questions of who gets to decide what technologies we build?

How does money and ideology also drive the production of those technologies?

And how do we ultimately make sure that we actually reimagine the innovation ecosystem to work for a broad base of people all around the world?

And so that is kind of how I then set off on this journey of ultimately writing a book.

I didn't realize that I was working towards writing a book, but starting in 2018 when I took that job was essentially the moment in which I began researching the story that I document in it.

I interviewed over 250 people, so over 300 interviews.

Over 90 of those people were former or current OpenAI employees and executives.

So the book covers the inside story of OpenAI's first decade and how it ultimately got to where it is today.

But I didn't want to write a corporate book.

I felt very strongly that in order to help people understand

the impact of the AI industry, we would also have to travel well beyond Silicon Valley.

These companies tell us that AI is going to benefit everyone and that's their mission.

But you really start to see that rhetoric break down when you go to the places that look nothing like Silicon Valley, that speak nothing like Silicon Valley, and that have a history and culture that are fundamentally different as well.