Karen Hao

Yeah.

AI is a political project.

Meta, which was a social media company and now an AI company, the kind of AI data center that it's constructing now in Louisiana is nearly 400 times the size and footprint of the first data center that it built to support Facebook.

If someone is saying,

You cannot stop one of the forces that will come to shape how the future looks.

Then what's even the point of democracy after that?

Thank you for having me.

So thank you so much.

I think it's the only way that you can understand what is actually happening and how we as a society should be thinking about the products of this political project.

And I was very privileged in my journalistic career that I started covering AI in 2018 before the information about AI became really chaotic and messy.

And when ChatGPT came out in the world and suddenly everyone was suddenly trying to understand this technology, I felt like

if I had just begun my journey then, what is the kind of book that I would have wanted to help me, introduce me to this world?

Roughly the beginning of the modern iteration, but yes, AI has been around since the 1950s, so not all the way at the beginning.

I was following them quite closely at a time when they weren't really well known by the rest of the world.

It was a non-profit.

It was a non-profit.

Which seems hilarious now.

Yeah, co-founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

And the idea at the time was they were going to be a fundamental AI research lab, not work on any commercial products.

And they would open up all of their research to the world.