Karen Hao

Ultimately, OpenAI was successful in that conversion, but during the period where it was sort of existential for OpenAI to complete this conversion, there were a lot of civil society groups and watchdog groups like Midas who were trying to

prevent the process from happening in the dead of night they were trying to get more transparency they were trying to have more public debate about this because it's unprecedented and it was then that um there was a knock on his door and he was served papers what do the papers say

The papers asked him to reproduce every single piece of communication that he had had that might have involved Musk.

So this was like the strange paranoia that OpenAI had that Musk was somehow funding these people to block the conversion.

None of them were actually funded by Musk.

So in this particular case, the request he simply was just answered, you know, I don't have any documents because this doesn't exist.

was labor exploitation.

The third one, controlling knowledge production.

And one of the other ones that's really important to understand about the AI empires in particular is empires always have this narrative that they say to the public, like, we're the good empire, and we need to be an empire in the first place because there are also bad empires in the world.

And if you allow us to take all the resources and use all of the labor, then we promise we will bring you progress and modernity for everyone.

We will bring you to this utopic state akin to an AI heaven.

But if the evil empire does it first, we will descend into a hell.

In this case, most often it's China.

But actually in the early days, OpenAI evoked Google as the evil empire.

So all of their decisions were about, we need to do it first because otherwise Google, this evil corporation that's driven by profit, us as a benevolent nonprofit, this is a critical contest of who wins.

What do you think Sam believes?

So this is so funny, is such a core part of the mythology that they create around the AI industry

includes the belief that it could go very badly.

It goes hand in hand.

Like they need that part of the myth in order to then say, and that's why we need to be in control of the technology because that's the only way that it's going to go really, really well.