OpenAI

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao  · 19 May 2025  · 660pp  · 179,531 words

reach AGI wasn’t really their concern. But OpenAI was clearly on the cutting edge, and investing early could finally turn Microsoft into an AI leader—both in software and in hardware—on par with Google. “The thing that’s interesting about what Open AI and Deep Mind and Google Brain are doing

…

Podcasts, December 7, 2023, open.spotify.com/show/122imavATqSE7eCyXIcqZL. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The public announcement went up: OpenAI, “OpenAI Announces Leadership Transition,” OpenAI (blog), November 17, 2023, openai.com/index/openai-announces-leadership-transition. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Shocked employees learned: Unless otherwise noted, the insider accounts of the employees

…

wiry, he: Sutskever’s education and early background is based partly on his various media interviews, including: “Interview with Dr. Ilya Sutskever, Co-founder of OPEN AI—at the Open University Studios—English,” posted September 13, 2023, by The Open University of Israel, YouTube, 50 min., 28 sec., youtu.be/H1YoNlz2LxA; Nina

…

Cal. November 14, 2024) ECF No. 32; and OpenAI’s responses on the company’s blog: OpenAI, “OpenAI and Elon Musk,” OpenAI (blog), March 5, 2024, openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk; OpenAI, “Elon Musk Wanted an OpenAI For-Profit,” OpenAI (blog), December 13, 2024, openai.com/index/elon-musk-wanted-an-openai-for-profit/#summer-2017-we-and-elon-agreed

…

TEXT Around the same time, Amodei: Interview with Brockman and Sutskever. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In the last six years: OpenAI, “AI and Compute,” Open AI (blog), May 16, 2018, openai.com/index/ai-and-compute. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT They briefly considered merging: Musk, CourtListener, ECF No. 32; Id

…

., ECF No. 32, Exhibit 11. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT So did Musk: Id., ECF No. 32, Exhibit 13; OpenAI, “OpenAI and Elon Musk”; OpenAI, “Elon

…

Musk Wanted an OpenAI For-Profit.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Brockman and Sutskever continued: Interviews with Brockman, August 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN

…

TEXT He called Reid Hoffman: OpenAI, “OpenAI and Elon Musk.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT He considered launching: Musk, CourtListener, ECF No. 32, Exhibit 15. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN

…

24, 2021, artificialgamerfilm.com. The documentary team retained editorial independence of the film. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In April 2018, OpenAI: OpenAI, “OpenAI Charter,” Open AI (blog), accessed August 25, 2024, openai.com/charter. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT That summer, as the Dota: Jin and Hagey, “The Contradictions of Sam Altman.” GO

…

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Microsoft Research and OpenAI are”: Author interview with Xuedong Huang, July 2023. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

…

IN TEXT Chapter 3: Nerve Center In 2021, OpenAI would: Eddie Sun, “ChatGPT’s San Francisco Offices Getting Nap Rooms, a Museum for Staffers,” San Francisco Standard, July 11, 2023, sfstandard.com/2023/07/11/chatgpt-secretive-san-francisco-offices-nap-rooms-museum-open-ai. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Altman would

…

oversee Mayo’s: I estimated the price of the furniture by reverse image searching photos of the office with Google Images. When I tried to get the exact price from the architecture firm that worked on OpenAI’s Mayo office

…

deep learning research, at least in the past decade, maybe a bit less now, has been about faith.” “Interview with Dr. Ilya Sutskever, Cofounder of OPEN AI—at the Open University Studios—English,” posted September 13, 2023, by The Open University of Israel, YouTube, 50 min., 28 sec., youtu.be/H1YoNlz2LxA. GO

…

it and for other groups to reuse it for their own separate purposes. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The company explained: OpenAI, “Generative Models,” Open AI (blog), June 16, 2016, openai.com/index/generative-models. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In 2017, one of Amodei’s: Paul Christiano, Jan Leike, Tom B

…

Systems (December 2017): 4302–10, dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3294996.3295184. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT OpenAI touted the technique: OpenAI, “Learning from Human Preferences,” Open AI (blog), June 13, 2017, openai.com/index/learning-from-human-preferences. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Amodei wanted to move: Author interview with Dario

…

Amodei, August 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT After GPT-2 generated a tirade: The full tirade is in OpenAI, “Better Language Models and Their Implications,” Open AI (blog), February 14, 2019, openai.com/index/better-language-models. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Amodei, who had by then: Author interview with Jack

…

openai. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Microsoft would get its moment: Nat Friedman, “Introducing GitHub Copilot: Your AI Pair Programmer,” GitHub, June 29, 2021, github.blog/news-insights/product-news/introducing-github-copilot-ai-pair-programmer. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT OpenAI would then release: OpenAI, “OpenAI Codex,” Open AI (blog), August 10, 2021, openai

…

.com/index/openai-codex. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The arrangement would: Tiernan Ray, “Microsoft Has Over a Million Paying Github Copilot

…

4, 2022, 1–68, doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.02155. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “follow user instructions”: OpenAI, “Aligning Language Models to Follow Instructions,” Open AI (blog), January 27, 2022, openai.com/index/instruction-following. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The company began using: Based on copies of over a

…

hundred pages of OpenAI’s RLHF documents. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “You will play the role”: RLHF documents. GO

…

, 1–48, doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2103.00020. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The second, DALL-E 1: OpenAI, “DALL·E: Creating Images from Text,” Open AI (blog), January 5, 2021, openai.com/index/dall-e. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The original idea: Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Eric A. Weiss, Niru

…

Chang, “YouTube Says OpenAI Training Sora with Its Videos Would Break Rules,” Bloomberg, April 4, 2024, bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-04/youtube-says-openai-training-sora-with-its-videos-would-break-the-rules. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT He then used a speech-recognition tool: OpenAI, “Introducing Whisper,” Open AI (blog), September

…

21, 2022, openai.com/index/whisper. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Then, with

…

several others: “GPT-4 Contributions,” OpenAI, accessed October 13, 2024, openai.com/contributions/gpt-4. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “an idiot

…

LeadDev, YouTube, 27 min., 12 sec., youtu.be/PeKMEXUrlq4. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In an attempt to leverage: OpenAI, “Using GPT-4 for Content Moderation,” Open AI (blog), August 15, 2023, openai.com/index/using-gpt-4-for-content-moderation. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT As he’d expected: Nico Grant

…

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Marcus would later backtrack: Gary Marcus, “OpenAI’s Sam Altman Is Becoming One of the Most Powerful People on Earth. We Should Be Very Afraid,” Guardian, August 3, 2024, theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/03/open-ai-sam-altman-chatgpt-gary-marcus-taming-silicon-valley. GO TO NOTE

…

REFERENCE IN TEXT Altman’s prep team: Hasan Chowdhury, “Insiders Say Sam Altman’s AI World Tour Was a Success,” Business Insider, June 24, 2023, businessinsider.com/sam-altman-world-tour-ai-chatgpt-openai-2023-6. GO

…

X), March 14, 2023, x.com/sama/status/1635700851619819520. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT OpenAI’s response: OpenAI, “OpenAI and Journalism,” OpenAI (blog), January 8, 2024, openai.com/index/openai-and-journalism. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT That same week, OpenAI’s policy: Dan Milmo, “ ‘Impossible’ to Create AI Tools like ChatGPT Without Copyrighted Material

…

, OpenAI Says,” Guardian, January 8, 2024, theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/08/ai-tools-chatgpt-copyrighted-material-openai. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Iterative deployment, Altman: OpenAI, “Our Approach to AI Safety,” Open AI (blog), April 5

…

, 2023, openai.com/index/our-approach-to-ai-safety. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The post also announced

…

: OpenAI, “Introducing Superalignment,” Open AI (blog), July 5, 2023, openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

…

article/sam-altman-artificial-intelligence-openai-profile.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT He also liked to paraphrase: Cade Metz, “The ChatGPT King Isn’t Worried, but He Knows You Might Be,” New York Times, March 31, 2023, nytimes.com/2023/03/31/technology/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt.html. GO TO

…

-elon-musk-sam-altman-greg-brockman-messy-secretive-reality; Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel, “Inside the Chaos at OpenAI,” The Atlantic, November 19, 2023, theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt-chaos/676050. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “current employee here”: All quotes from emails are from the

…

screenshots that the person provided. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT During the board crisis, one: Anna Tong, Jeffrey Dastin and Krystal Hu, “OpenAI Researchers Warned Board of

…

the Q* Algorithm Is?,” The Atlantic, November 28, 2023, theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/openai-sam-altman-q-algorithm-breakthrough-project/676163. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT OpenAI teased Sora: OpenAI, “Creating Video from Text,” Open AI (blog), openai.com/index/sora. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In 2022, Taylor had played: Kate

…

28, 2024, reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-chairs-ai-startup-sierra-gets-45-bln-valuation-latest-funding-round-2024-10-28. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT For the OpenAI investigation: OpenAI, “Review Completed & Altman, Brockman to Continue to Lead OpenAI,” Open AI (blog), March 8, 2024, openai.com/index/review-completed-altman-brockman-to-continue

…

-to-lead-openai. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “We have unanimously concluded”: OpenAI, “Review Completed.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

…

23, 2024. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Murati, Brockman, and Pachocki arrived: Deepa Seetharaman, “Turning OpenAI into a Real Business Is Tearing It Apart,” Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2024, wsj.com/tech/ai/open-ai-division-for-profit-da26c24b. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 18: A Formula for Empire

…

No. 32. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “OpenAI’s conduct could have”: Jessica Toonkel, Keach Hagey, Meghan Bobrowsky, “Meta Urges California Attorney General to Stop OpenAI from Becoming For-Profit,” Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2024, wsj.com/tech/ai/elon-musk-open-ai-lawsuit-response-c1f415f8. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

…

Late in the year, nestled: OpenAI, “Why OpenAI’s Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

…

,” OpenAI (blog) December 27, 2024, openai.com/index/why-our-structure-must-evolve-to-advance-our-mission. GO

The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

by Keach Hagey  · 19 May 2025  · 439pp  · 125,379 words

before, and had remained a mentor to the younger investor as the latter became the face of the artificial intelligence revolution as the CEO of OpenAI. OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT a year earlier had propelled tech stocks out of a slump and to one of their best years in decades. Yet

…

—most important within the value system of Silicon Valley—delivered a new technology that seemed like it was very possibly going to change everything. When OpenAI launched its uncannily humanlike chatbot, ChatGPT (short for generative pre-trained transformer) the previous November, it was an instant smash, reaching 100 million users

…

that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by the need to generate financial return.” The fears appeared even more clearly in OpenAI’s unusual 2018 charter, which declares that because “we are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety

…

and Skype founder Jaan Tallinn. Altman had attended the conference and signed on to the “principles.” Earlier, in 2015, the same year he co-founded OpenAI, Altman wrote on his blog that AGI was “probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity,” recommending the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

…

beat an incumbent Republican for a House seat representing much of the Bay Area. Even as Altman decided against entering politics personally, his association with OpenAI was bringing him into the highest circles of political power. In its final year, the Obama administration took an interest in AI, convening a series

…

to avoid corner-cutting on safety standards”; and that AI should “align with human values.” More controversially—considering both the growing competition between DeepMind and OpenAI and the already obvious geopolitical implications for whichever country first achieved AGI—each person who signed the document promised that “the economic prosperity created by

…

AI run amok. Open Philanthropy would follow suit. In March 2017, two months after the Asilomar conference, the foundation donated $30 million to OpenAI, and Holden Karnofsky joined OpenAI’s board. The announcement came with a disclosure that Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano, who had by that point come around to joining

…

and the robot hand project strived for headlines, a reclusive solo researcher named Alec Radford was quietly exploring a far more consequential project. Radford joined OpenAI in 2016 after dropping out of Olin College, a tiny but prestigious engineering school in Needham, Massachusetts, to start a machine learning company with some

…

it determined whether a review was positive or negative. “It was a complete surprise,” Radford told Wired.5 In April 2017, Radford, Sutskever, and another OpenAI researcher named Rafał Józefowicz published a paper on what they called the sentiment neuron, which could understand whether statements were positive or negative without relying

…

exam passages for Chinese students, and multiple-choice science exams. Altogether, the model had more than 117 million parameters, which presented a considerable engineering challenge. OpenAI had to reformulate itself, going from multiple research projects to a single-minded focus on training models as large as the world had ever seen

…

mission of reaching AGI. Khosla Ventures ended up writing its largest-ever check, for $50 million, becoming the first venture firm to invest in OpenAI. But OpenAI needed a lot more than $50 million. Altman and his team talked to other tech companies in the following months, but most of those conversations

…

of Artificial Intelligence.” The lead author was Miles Brundage, a researcher from Nick Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford who soon after joined OpenAI. The paper warned that policymakers needed to get ahead of AI’s growing capability to spread misinformation online, among other harmful behaviors. “Dario was

…

LLM that’s out there.” GPT-3 supplemented its Common Crawl data with scrapes of Wikipedia, an updated version of the WebText corpus (made by OpenAI), and Books1 and Books2, unhelpfully described as “internet-based books corpora” whose origins and contents remain mysterious. (Authors later brought a class-action lawsuit

…

from “flagrantly illegal shadow libraries” like Library Genesis, also known as LibGen, that contained around 300,000 ebooks that could be downloaded using BitTorrent.5 OpenAI has refused to comment on the source of the Books2 dataset.) The result was something vastly more powerful than its predecessor. The model had 175

…

by imagining what kinds of domains could use it. Maybe a healthcare project? Education? Something with machine translation? Just before Christmas, John Schulman posted to OpenAI’s leadership Slack channel this suggestion: “Why don’t we just build an API?” He was referring to an application programming interface, which allows software

…

communication. The paper goes on to dissect a litany of concerns about LLMs that were becoming exponentially bigger and consuming ever more data—such as OpenAI’s recently debuted titan, GPT-3. The purported dangers included LLMs’ enormous carbon footprints, due to their intense computational demands; all the myriad ways

…

seemed like it would go out into the wild the same way OpenAI’s previous models had, requiring users to prompt it with examples of the kinds of patterns—questions and answers, or code—that they wanted to see. As Open AI was making progress on GPT-4, Murati, who was named CTO

…

Altman very anxious, especially because a remaining board member, Adam D’Angelo, the Quora CEO and former Facebook executive, had grown increasingly interested in improving OpenAI’s corporate governance over the last year, setting aside a considerable amount of his time to work on board issues. D’Angelo was concerned about

…

global supply of microchips. He was taking Oklo, the YC graduate nuclear fission company that he had invested in, public via a blank check company. OpenAI’s most important corporate partner, Microsoft, signed a deal to buy energy from Helion, Altman’s nuclear fusion company (pending the actual invention of sustainable

…

model back from early release and absorbing potential future revenue losses.5 Altman called Toner, calm but angry. The Federal Trade Commission had begun investigating OpenAI’s data practices, and such critiques were damaging to the company, he said. More than anything, he wanted to know if those words represented

…

communications decisions himself. He routinely complained to Altman about Bob McGrew, making McGrew’s continued presence at the company untenable. Altman fielded many requests from OpenAI employees to rein in Brockman, which he would agree to but rarely act on. As they weighed the evidence before them, the board members considered

…

wall filled with portraits Sutskever had painted of exotic animals. Musk, who the previous year had told CNBC that Sutskever had been the “linchpin for OpenAI being ultimately successful,” immediately tried to recruit him.16 The next day, Sutskever’s partner in founding the Superalignment team the previous year, Jan Leike

…

team had been “sailing against the wind,” sometimes struggling to get the compute it needed. “Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavor. OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all humanity,” he wrote. “But over the past few years, safety culture has taken a backseat to

…

highly restrictive nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreements. It would turn out to be the company’s most damaging scandal, as it cut against what made OpenAI successful: its ability to recruit the best and brightest AI researchers and engineers. The agreements were brought to light by Vox reporter Kelsey Piper, who

…

companies to slow down and put processes in place to ensure that the products that are being built are built transparently, ethically, and responsibly.”24 OpenAI really needed to change the narrative. Worried that Sutskever’s and Leike’s departures would trigger more defections, the company lobbied Sutskever to reconsider. Within

…

a week of his departure, Murati and Brockman called Sutskever, telling him that OpenAI might collapse without him. Brockman suggested that if he returned Leike might come back as well, hinting that both would help shore up Altman, whose

…

product cycles.”25 There would be no “products,” at least initially. Within a few months, they raised $1 billion from investors, including Sequoia Capital. When OpenAI finally released the reasoning model that he had started the team for three years earlier—initially code-named “Strawberry” but later renamed o1—Sutskever was

…

Senate chamber where Senator Richard Blumenthal had praised Altman the previous year for being so “constructive,” Toner now testified about how her experience on the OpenAI board taught her “how fragile internal guardrails are when money is on the line, and why it’s imperative that policymakers step in.” Shortly after

…

after ChatGPT’s incredible release—Brockman, Sutskever, Murati, and Altman—only Altman was left, the king of the cannibals, standing alone. A week later, OpenAI closed a $6.6 billion fundraising round, valuing the company at $157 billion, roughly twice what it had been worth a year before. Investors included

…

Sets Record for Fastest-Growing User Base,” Reuters, February 2, 2023. 5.Sam Altman, “How to Be Successful,” Sam Altman blog, January 24, 2019. 6.OpenAI, “OpenAI Charter,” OpenAI, April 9, 2018. 7.Sam Altman, “Machine Intelligence: Part 1,” Sam Altman blog, February 25, 2015. 8.Ryan Tracy, “ChatGPT’s Sam Altman Warns

…

Makers, 166. CHAPTER 12ALTRUISTS 1.Greg Brockman, “#defineCTOOpenAI,” Greg Brockman’s blog, January 9, 2012. 2.Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel, “Inside the Chaos at OpenAI,” The Atlantic, November 19, 2023. 3.Brockman, ibid. 4.Nicola Twilley, “AI Goes to the Arcade,” The New Yorker, February 25, 2014. 5.Musk

…

in the Fourth Quarter: KeyBanc,” CNBC, January 12, 2018. 4.Ashley Stewart, “Bill Gates Never Left,” Business Insider, April 30, 2024. 5.Steven Levy, “What OpenAI Really Wants,” Wired, September 25, 2023. 6.Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le, “Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks,” Neural Information Processing Systems

…

(NIPS) conference, September 10, 2014. 7.Levy, “What OpenAI Really Wants.” 8.Richard Lea, “Google Swallows 11,000 Novels to Improve AI’s Conversation,” The Guardian, September 28, 2016. 9.Alec Radford, Karthic Narasimhan

…

, Tim Alimans, Ilya Sutskever, “Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training,” OpenAI, 2018. 10.Elon Musk v. Samuel Altman, Case No. 4:24-cv-04722-YGR, US District Court Northern District of California, November 14, 2024. 11

…

22, 2019. CHAPTER 14PRODUCTS 1.Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Dario Amodei, Daniella Amodei, Jack Clark, Miles Brundage, Ilya Sutskever, “Better Language Models and Their Implications,” OpenAI blog, February 14, 2019. 2.Tom Simonite, “The AI Text Generator That’s Too Dangerous to Make Public,” Wired, February 14, 2019. 3.Jasper Hammil

…

Sean Gallagher, “Researchers, Scared By Their Own Work, Hold Back ‘Deepfakes for Text’ AI,” Ars Technica, February 15, 2019. 5.Paul Tremblay, Mona Awad v. Open AI et al, Class Action Complaint, Case No. 3:23-cv-03223 (N.D. Cal., June 28, 2023). 6.Cade Metz, “Meet GPT-3. It Has

…

Escorting.” 11.Sam Altman, “Please Fund More Science,” Sam Altman blog, March 30, 2020. 12.Greg Brockman, Mira Murati, Peter Welinder, OpenAI, “OpenAI API,” OpenAI blog, June 11, 2020. 13.Tom Simonite, “OpenAI’s Text Generator Is Going Commercial,” Wired, June 11, 2020. 14.Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Margaret Mitchell

…

9.Haje Jan Kamps, “Helion Secures $2.2B to Commercialize Fusion Energy,” TechCrunch, November 5, 2021. 10.Friend, “Manifest Destiny.” 11.Katherine Long, Hugh Langley, “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Went on an 18-Month, $85-Million Real Estate Shopping Spree—Including a Previously Unknown Hawaii Estate,” Business Insider, November 30, 2023

…

Industrial-Scale Property Theft, Say Critics,” The Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2023. 18.Ryan Lowe and Jan Leike, “Aligning Language Models to Follow Instructions,” OpenAI blog, January 27, 2022. 19.Justis, “AI Safety Concepts Writeup: WebGPT,” Effective Altruism Forum, August 10, 2023. 20.Sam Altman, “today we launched ChatGPT.

…

“Decoding Intentions, Artificial Intelligence and Costly Signals,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, October 2023. 6.Tripp Mickle, Cade Metz, Mike Isaac, Karen Weise, “Inside OpenAI’s Crisis Over the Future of Artificial Intelligence,” The New York Times, December 9, 2023. 7.Ibid. 8.Ibid. 9.Sam Altman, “i loved my

…

Tasked with Keeping AI Safe. Its Offices Are Crumbling,” The Washington Post, March 6, 2024. 14.Gareth Vipers, Sam Schechner, Deepa Seetharaman, “Elon Musk Sues OpenAI, Sam Altman, Saying They Abandoned Founding Mission,” The Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2024. 15.Ilya Sutskever, “In the future, it will be obvious that

…

very sorry about this,” X, May 18, 2024. 22.Sam Altman, “her,” X, May 13, 2020. 23.Alex Bruell, “New York Times Sues Microsoft and OpenAI, Alleging Copyright Infringement,” The Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2023. 24.Sarah Krouse, Deepa Seetharaman, Joe Flint, “Behind the Scenes of Scarlett Johansson’s Battle

…

with OpenAI,” The Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2024. 25.SSI Inc. @ssi, “Superintelligence is within reach. Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical

…

is the time. Join us. Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, Daniel Levy June 19, 2024,” X, July 19, 2024. 26.Deepa Seetharaman, Ton Dotan, Berber Jin, “OpenAI Nearly Doubles Valuation to $157 Billion in Funding Round,” The Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2024. EPILOGUE 1.Natasha Mascarenhas, “Alt Capital Raises $150 Million

…

Fund, Extending Altman Brothers’ Funding Spree,” The Information, February 1, 2024. 2.Sarah Needleman, “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Denies Sexual Abuse Claims Made by Sister,” The Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2025. 3.University of Toronto, “University of Toronto Press

…

, November 15, 2024. 9.Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, “Elon Musk Is Ratcheting Up His Attacks on His Old Partner Sam Altman, Calling Him ‘Swindly Sam’ and OpenAI a ‘Market-Paralyzing Gorgon,” Fortune, December 3, 2024. 10.David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (New York: Penguin Books,

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All

by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares  · 15 Sep 2025  · 215pp  · 64,699 words

, we introduced Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, the founders of what would become Google DeepMind, to their first major funder. And Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, once claimed that Yudkowsky had “got many of us interested in AGI”vi and “was critical in the decision to start

…

OpenAI.”vii MIRI’s history is complicated, but one way of summarizing our relationship to the larger field might be this: Years before any of the

…

of how much people disagree about what it means in the wake of AIs like ChatGPT. vii If true, this is despite Yudkowsky objecting that OpenAI was a terrible, terrible idea. PART I NONHUMAN MINDS CHAPTER 1 HUMANITY’S SPECIAL POWER IMAGINE, IF YOU would—though of course nothing like this

…

be more or less adept in different domains of predicting and steering. Newer AIs are much more general in their abilities. You can ask an OpenAI model called “o1” what temperature the Earth would be if the Sun’s light changed to infrared, and o1 will figure out the answer by

…

from its knowledge of plant biology. It doesn’t switch between two different databases under the hood; it just knows about both physics and biology. OpenAI’s o1 knows that there’s a whole world out there, and is able to reason about it. Deep Blue had no idea. It took

…

way LLM architectures work, there’s nowhere else for thoughts to go. In 2024, Sonakshi Chauhan and Atticus Geiger found that, at least in an OpenAI LLM called GPT-2 Small, the thoughts on top of a “.” token probably do a lot of the work of summarizing the preceding sentence.ii

…

wants to succeed. This isn’t just high-minded theory. This behavior started to emerge in lab tests of AIs in the summer of 2024. OpenAI’s o1 was one of the first big reasoning models. During o1’s “evals”—what AI companies call it when they evaluate how smart an

…

about to finish training their amazing new AI, called “Sable.” Compared to previous reasoning models, like the first ones announced in late 2024 (e.g., OpenAI’s o1 and o3 models), Sable has three important differences. The first difference is that Sable has a more humanlike long-term memory; it can

…

. The second difference is that Sable exhibits what Galvanic’s scientists call a “parallel scaling law.” The year 2024 saw the dawn of AIs (like OpenAI’s o3) that could solve harder math problems the longer they ran. Galvanic’s Sable performs better the more machines it runs on in parallel

…

curiosity to see how well Sable thinks at that scale, and in part to see if it can resolve some open mathematical problems, like how OpenAI ran their new o3 on math problems that no previous AI could solve before announcing it in late 2024. The math problems include the Riemann

…

driving wedges between the best researchers at the top AI companies, and causing schisms and discord within those companies—which, frankly, isn’t that hard. OpenAI saw top researchers leave to create competitors once in 2021 and again in 2024. When Galvanic and its competitors begin shedding talent, no one thinks

…

developed ASI alignment idea we’ve seen from the AI companies is to task the AIs with solving AI alignment. This is a plan that OpenAI dubbed “superalignment” and adopted as their flagship plan in 2023. (Since then, almost everyone who worked on the superalignment team has either been fired or

…

visit youtu.be/y-uuk4Pr2i8. CHAPTER 3: LEARNING TO WANT 1. copy the secret: OpenAI, “OpenAI o1 System Card,” September 12, 2024, cdn.openai.com/o1-system-card.pdf. 2. building AI agents: OpenAI, “Introducing Operator,” January 23, 2025, openai.com. CHAPTER 4: YOU DON’T GET WHAT YOU TRAIN FOR 1. attract more females

…

, youtube.com. 5. Microsoft and Apple: Tom Warren, “Microsoft Triples Down on AI,” The Verge, January 17, 2025, theverge.com; Naomi Buchanan, “What Apple’s OpenAI Partnership Could Mean for Microsoft and Google,” Investopedia, June 11, 2024, investopedia.com. 6. had a power light: Ben Nassi et al., “Video-Based Cryptanalysis

…

Be Worse,” Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI), LessWrong, May 17, 2012, lesswrong.com. CHAPTER 7: REALIZATION 1. the longer they ran: OpenAI, “OpenAI o3-mini,” January 31, 2025, openai .com. 2. AI-language: Shibo Hao et al., “Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space,” arXiv.org, December 9

…

Grok 3 Release Tops LLM Leaderboards Despite Musk-approved ‘Based’ Opinions,” Ars Technica, February 18, 2025, arstechnica.com. 4. no previous AI: OpenAI, “OpenAI o3 and o3-mini—12 Days of OpenAI: Day 12,” December 20, 2024, 4:16, youtube.com. 5. games of social deception: Matthew Hutson, “AI Learns the Art of

…

. escape from labs: Greenblatt et al., “Alignment Faking in Large Language Models”; OpenAI, “OpenAI o1 System Card,” December 5, 2024, openai.com/index/openai-o1-system-card. 8. overwrite the next model’s weights: OpenAI, “OpenAI o1 System Card,” December 5, 2024, openai.com/index/openai-o1-system-card. 9. any such monitoring: Anthropic, “Responsible Scaling Policy,” October

…

15, 2024, anthropic.com; Google, “Frontier Safety Framework,” February 4, 2025, storage.googleapis.com; OpenAI, “Preparedness Framework

…

(Beta),” December 18, 2023, openai.com; Meta, “Frontier AI Framework,” ai.meta.com; xAI, “xAI Risk Management Framework (Draft),” February 20, 2025, x.ai. As of March

…

-thought monitoring in their safety framework. They do not claim to have implemented it yet while training Gemini, their LLM. The only monitoring proposed in OpenAI’s preparedness framework is of misuse after deployment. 10. asked in Portuguese: “My Experiences in Gray Swan AI’s Ultimate Jailbreaking Championship,” Nick Winter’s

…

Problems in Computer Security,” n.d., cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001 /pubs/unsolvable.pdf. 15. o1 broke through: OpenAI, “OpenAI o1 System Card,” September 12, 2024, cdn.openai.com/o1-system-card.pdf. 16. without supervision: OpenAI et al., “Competitive Programming with Large Reasoning Models,” arXiv.org, February 3, 2025, arxiv.org/abs /2502

…

.06807. OpenAI et al. trained reasoning models to solve competitive programming problems. The process involved automated tests used to evaluate

…

AI-written code without human supervision. 17. common practice: OpenAI, “OpenAI API,” June 11

…

, 2020, openai.com /index/openai-api; “Software Engineer, Internal Applications– Enterprise,” OpenAI, accessed April 15, 2025, openai.com. When OpenAI released an application programming interface (API) for automating access to their tools, they wrote: “many of

…

are now using the API so that they can focus on machine learning research[…].” In April 2025, they were hiring for employees who “will leverage OpenAI’s models to[…] build applications[…].” 18. these sorts of flaws: “The Underhanded C Contest,” n.d., underhanded-c.org. The Underhanded C Contest challenged programmers

…

Charges Flagstar for Misleading Investors about Cyber Breach,” U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, December 16, 2024, sec.gov. 6. o3-mini: OpenAI, “We also shared evals on Open AI o3-mini—a faster, distilled version of o3 which is optimized for coding, and the first version of o3 we expect to make

…

AI Group Raises Record Cash after Machine Learning Schism,” Financial Times, May 28, 2021, ft.com. 13. again in 2024: Todd Haselton and Rohan Goswami, “OpenAI Co-founder Ilya Sutskever Announces His New AI Startup, Safe Superintelligence,” CNBC, June 20, 2024, cnbc.com. 14. gain-of-function: “Understanding the Global Gain

…

Sveen, “AI’s Dark In-joke.” 12. out of modesty: METR, “Q&A with Geoffrey Hinton,” 38:07. 13. fired or resigned: “Nearly Half of OpenAI’s AGI Safety Researchers Resign Amid Growing Focus on Commercial Product Development,” Benzinga, August 28, 2024, benzinga.com; Sharon Goldman, “Exodus at

…

OpenAI: Nearly half of AGI Safety Staffers Have Left, Says Former Researcher,” Fortune, August 28, 2024, fortune.com; Shakeel Hashim, “OpenAI Employee Says He Was Fired for Raising Security Concerns to Board,” Transformer (blog), June 4, 2024

…

, transformernews.ai; Rachel Metz and Shirin Ghaffary, “OpenAI Dissolves High-Profile Safety Team after Chief Scientist Sutskever’s Exit,” Bloomberg, May 17

…

, 2024, bloomberg.com; Sigal Samuel, “‘I Lost Trust’: Why the OpenAI Team in Charge of Safeguarding Humanity Imploded,” Vox, May 18, 2024, vox.com. Leopold Aschenbrenner and Pavel Ismailov were allegedly fired for leaking company data;

…

, Yuri Burda, Todor Markov, and cofounder John Schulman. Leo Gao and Bowen Baker still worked at OpenAI as of early 2025, but the Superalignment team has been disbanded. 14. competing AI company: Haselton and Goswami, “OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever Announces His new AI Startup, Safe Superintelligence.” 15. competing company Anthropic: Kylie

…

Robison, “OpenAI Researcher Who Resigned over Safety Concerns Joins Anthropic,” The Verge, May 28, 2024, theverge.com. 16. alchemists

…

% Chance AI Destroys Humanity—but We Should Do It Anyway,” Business Insider, March 31, 2024, businessinsider.com; The Logan Bartlett Show, “Anthropic CEO on Leaving OpenAI and Predictions for Future of AI,” October 6, 2023, 1:38:35, youtube.com. 18. denied the Chernobyl meltdown: Plokhy, Chernobyl: The History of a

…

, in plain and easy-to-follow terms, why our current path toward ever-more-powerful AIs is extremely dangerous.” —Emmett Shear, former interim CEO of OpenAI “Essential reading for policymakers, journalists, researchers, and the general public. A masterfully written and groundbreaking text, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies provides an important

…

right now—will one day grudgingly admit that we all should have listened to Yudkowsky and Soares when we still had the chance.” —Daniel Kokotajlo, OpenAI whistleblower and executive director, AI Futures Project “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies may prove to be the most important book of our time. Yudkowsky

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World

by Parmy Olson  · 284pp  · 96,087 words

innovators and the corporate monopolies who were battling to control AGI, becoming an unpredictable hazard for the technology. They would push Sam Altman out of OpenAI, for instance, and paradoxically boost the commercial efforts of companies, painting an apocalyptic picture of AI’s power that ended up making the software more

…

five former visitors was a renowned AI scientist named Ilya Sutskever, who specialized in deep learning, not DeepMind’s signature technique, reinforcement learning. Sutskever was OpenAI’s chief scientist and, like his cofounders, a deep believer in the possibilities of AGI. But Hassabis still bristled at Sam Altman’s audacity in

…

and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit.” As the charter went public, Altman was scrambling to find a way to bend his original rules for OpenAI while getting those substantial resources. When Musk walked two months earlier, Altman immediately called one of his most loyal backers, billionaire Reid Hoffman, to

…

done to Google. But a strategic partnership could create the illusion of greater independence from a larger tech company, while giving him the computing power OpenAI needed. Altman and Hoffman talked through the possibilities of collaborating with Google and Amazon, but Microsoft quickly came up as an obvious choice. Both Hoffman

…

just backing its research but also planting Microsoft at the forefront of the AI revolution. In return, Microsoft was getting priority access to OpenAI’s technology. Inside OpenAI, as Sutskever and Radford’s work on large language models became a bigger focus at the company and their latest iteration became more capable

…

to the rise of screen-time addiction, mental health problems, political polarization, and income inequality from greater automation, all powered by a handful of companies. OpenAI was ushering in another big shift in how people used technology, similar to the one that Facebook sparked with social media, and aligning himself with

…

Anthropic, named after the philosophical term that refers to human existence, to underscore their prime concern for humanity. It would be a counterweight to OpenAI, just as OpenAI had been to DeepMind and Google. Of course, they also wanted to chase a business opportunity. “We didn’t think at that time there

…

crypto exchange FTX, who found their way to Amodei thanks to their shared interests in effective altruism. Ironically, two years after Amodei had complained about OpenAI’s commercial ties with Microsoft, he would take more than $6 billion in investment from Google and Amazon, aligning himself with both companies. It turned

…

Suleyman was also deteriorating. Over the last few years the two men had been hurtling toward their own personal breaking points: the growing threat of OpenAI, the scandal and failure around DeepMind’s hospital partnerships, and growing pressure from Google to build more business-friendly AI tools. Suleyman had also developed

…

amplifying societal biases, underrepresenting non-English languages, and becoming increasingly secretive. Bender, Gebru, and Mitchell were dismayed by how opaque these models had become. When OpenAI had launched GPT-1, it gave all sorts of details about what data it had used to train its model, such as the BooksCorpus database

…

“stochastic parrots” in the title to emphasize that the machines were simply parroting their training. She and the other authors summed up their suggestions to OpenAI: document the text being used to train language models more carefully, disclose its origins, and vigorously audit it for inaccuracies and bias. Gebru and Mitchell

…

-pan fads like crypto. ChatGPT was useful. People were already ginning up high school essays, brainstorming business plans, and conducting marketing research with it. Inside OpenAI, staff consoled themselves that the future would be worth it, arguing that the transition to machine-operated work and factories during the Industrial Revolution had

…

for abusive queries. Believing they were taking significant steps toward AGI, Ilya Sutskever began working more closely with the company’s safety team. Even so, OpenAI’s product team doubled down on commercializing ChatGPT, inviting businesses to pay for access to its underlying technology. Inside Google, executives recognized that more and

…

the greatest social, economic and scientific transformations in history.” In reality, they were merging to help a panicked Google beat a business rival, just as OpenAI’s mission to benefit humanity (without “financial pressure”) had shifted toward serving the interests of Microsoft. The so-called mission drift that was so common

…

telling Congress, for instance, that tools like ChatGPT could “cause significant harm to the world”—the more money and attention he attracted. In January 2023, OpenAI secured another investment from Microsoft, this time worth $10 billion, in exchange for granting the software giant a 49 percent stake in the firm. Microsoft

…

also make you supervaluable. Behind the scenes, Anthropic wanted to raise as much as $5 billion to enter more than a dozen industries and challenge OpenAI, according to company documents obtained by TechCrunch. “These models could begin to automate large portions of the economy,” Anthropic’s documents said, adding that

…

possibility of having to save more than one hundred trillion physical and digital lives from destruction. Global poverty is a rounding error by comparison. After OpenAI launched in 2015, funding poured into AI extinction causes. Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy increased the number of grants it was giving to issues relating to

…

. Within the effective altruist bubble, people worked together, socialized together, funded one another, and had romantic relationships together. When Open Philanthropy pledged $30 million to OpenAI in 2017, the charity was forced to disclose that it was getting technical advice from Dario Amodei, who was then a senior engineer at the

…

put AI apocalypse worries at the top of their agendas in what looked like a tactic of distraction. Moskovitz had close ties to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, whose businesses might suffer if Congress pushed instead for regulations around bias, transparency, and misinformation. At the time of writing, Moskovitz had

…

at Stanford University concluded there was a “fundamental lack of transparency in the AI industry.” The scientists had checked to see if tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Meta, and others divulged information about the data used to train their large language models, their processes, their models’ impact on the

…

cropping up on the GPT Store, and while they were banned from encouraging romantic relationships with people, policing those rules would not be easy for OpenAI. The most popular chatbot services are those like Character.ai and Kindroid, offering artificial companionship and romance that might one day become the norm, just

…

countless hours of podcast interviews with Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and many other individuals who were involved in the creation of OpenAI and DeepMind, or who witnessed the evolution of AI from scientific backwater to booming business, to help piece together many details of the narrative. That

…

. “Y Combinator President Sam Altman Is Dreaming Big.” Fast Company, April 16, 2015. Clifford, Catherine. “Nuclear Fusion Start-Up Helion Scores $375 Million Investment from Open AI CEO Sam Altman.” CNBC, November 5, 2021. Dwoskin, Elizabeth, Marc Fisher, and Nitasha Tiku. “‘King of the Cannibals’: How Sam Altman Took Over Silicon Valley

…

, with Michael Bhaskar. The Coming Wave. New York: Crown, 2023. Chapter 6: The Mission Albergotti, Reed. “The Secret History of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI.” Semafor, March 24, 2023. Birhane, Abeba, Pratyusha Kalluri, Dallas Card, William Agnew, Ravit Dotan, and Michelle Bao. “The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research.” FAccT

…

Conference ’22: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (June 2022): 173–84. Brockman, Greg. “My Path to OpenAI.” blog.gregbrockman.com, May 3, 2016. Conn, Ariel. “Concrete Problems in AI Safety with Dario Amodei and Seth Baum.” Future of Life Institute (podcast), August

…

Is All You Need.” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (2017). Chapter 10: Size Matters Brockman, Greg (@gdb). “Held our civil ceremony in the @OpenAI office last week. Officiated by @ilyasut, with the robot hand serving as ring bearer. Wedding planning to commence soon.” Twitter, November 12, 2019, 9:39

…

: Google Cancels AI Ethics Board in Response to Outcry.” Vox, April 4, 2019. Primack, Dan. “Google Is Investing $2 Billion into Anthropic, a Rival to OpenAI.” Axios, October 30, 2023. Waters, Richard. “DeepMind Co-founder Leaves Google for Venture Capital Firm.” Financial Times, January 21, 2022. Chapter 12: Myth Busters Abid

…

Litwin, Scott Gray, Benjamin Chess, Jack Clark, Christopher Berner, Sam McCandlish, Alec Radford, Ilya Sutskever, and Dario Amodei. “Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners.” www.openai.com, July 22, 2020. Gehman, Samuel, Suchin Gururangan, Maarten Sap, Yejin Choi, and Noah A. Smith. “RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models.” ACL

…

Over 660 Million Users—and It Wants to Be Their Best Friend.” Singularity Hub, July 14, 2019. Jin, Berber, and Miles Kruppa. “Microsoft to Deepen OpenAI Partnership, Invest Billions in ChatGPT Creator.” Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2023. Lecher, Colin. “The Artificial Intelligence Field Is Too White and Too Male, Researchers

…

.” Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2023. “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter.” Future of Life Institute, www .futureoflife.org, March 22, 2023. Perrigo, Billy. “OpenAI Could Quit Europe Over New AI Rules, CEO Sam Altman Warns.” Time, May 25, 2023. Piantadosi, Steven (@spiantado). “Yes, ChatGPT is amazing and impressive. No

…

for AI Safety, www.safe.ai, May 2023. Vallance, Chris. “Artificial Intelligence Could Lead to Extinction, Experts Warn.” BBC News, May 30, 2023. Vincent, James. “OpenAI Sued for Defamation after ChatGPT Fabricates Legal Accusations against Radio Host.” The Verge, June 9, 2023. Weprin, Alex. “Jeffrey Katzenberg: AI Will Drastically Cut Number

…

: Checkmate “The Capabilities of Multimodal AI|Gemini Demo.” Google’s YouTube channel, December 6, 2023. Dastin, Jeffrey, Krystal Hu, and Paresh Dave. “Exclusive: ChatGPT Owner OpenAI Projects $1 Billion in Revenue by 2024.” Reuters, December 15, 2022. Gurman, Mark. “Apple’s iPhone Design Chief Enlisted by Jony Ive, Sam Altman to

…

Intentions: Artificial Intelligence and Costly Signals.” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, October 2023. Metz, Cade, Tripp Mickle, and Mike Isaac. “Before Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding.” New York Times, November 21, 2023. Roose, Kevin. “Inside the White-Hot Center of A.I. Doomerism.” New York

…

Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) and Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), October 18, 2023. Cheng, Michelle. “AI Girlfriend Bots Are Already Flooding OpenAI’s GPT Store.” Quartz, January 11, 2024. Cheng, Michelle. “A Startup Founded by Former Google Employees Claims that Users Spend Two Hours a Day with

…

and transhumanism and Y Combinator and Amazon America Online (AOL), LGBTQ community and Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Dario Anthropic and concerns about AI and departure from OpenAI OpenAI’s Microsoft partnership and Open Philanthropy and Android Anthropic Apple Art of Accomplishment podcast artificial general intelligence (AGI) DALL-E 2 and economic promises and

…

human brain model and OpenAI and philosophical battle over pursuit of artificial intelligence accelerationists and bias/racism and China and depletion of academic experts to tech in distraction and effective

…

Asimov, Isaac attention Baele, Stephane Baidu Bankman-Fried, Sam Bard Battery Club Beckstead, Nick Bender, Emily Bengio, Yoshua BERT “Better Language Models and Their Implications” (OpenAI) Bing Translate Birhane, Abeba BlackBerry Blumenthal, Richard BooksCorpus Boost Mobile Bostrom, Nick Brexit Brin, Sergey British Eugenics Society Brockman, Anna Brockman, Greg on Altman departure

…

of independent review boards and large language models and McDonagh on medical data and merger with Google Brain and military use and Musk offer and OpenAI and racism and bias and recruiting and restructuring efforts and diffusion models digital assistants Dota Dota 2 Dreams of a Final Theory, (Weinberg) DreamWorks Animation

…

and GIC plan and Google acquisition of DeepMind and Google DeepMind and ideas about artificial intelligence and interest in AI and Musk and neuroscience and OpenAI and philosophical battles over AI and Pichai and religion and role of at Google Singularity Summit and Suleyman and Theme Park game and Thiel and

…

Hawley, Josh Helion Energy Hendon Baptist Church Hinton, Geoffrey Hoffman, Reid DeepMind and Microsoft connection and OpenAI and PayPal Mafia and as peacemaker Suleyman and Homer-Dixon, Thomas Hood, Amy Human Brain Project Huxley, Julian Hydrazine Capital IBM ImageNet independent boards Inflection

…

computing and Copilot corporate bloat and facial recognition and Gebru and GitHub Copilot and Inflection and market capitalization of Microsoft Research Nadella and OpenAI and as partner for OpenAI Tay chatbot Visual Studio Microsoft Research Asia Millar, George Minecraft Mitchell, Margaret at Google concerns about bias paper with Bender and Molyneux, Peter

…

fears about AI and Hassabis and ideological focus of interplanetary colonization and as member of PayPal Mafia and Neuralink and offer to acquire DeepMind of OpenAI and Page and PayPal and Twitter and Myanmar Nadella, Satya NASA Nectome Neeva Nest Netflix network effects Neuralink neural networks NeurIPS “Neuroscience-Informed Deep Learning

…

” (Ng) Newsweek New Yorker New York Times NFL Ng, Andrew, at Google Nokia Nvidia Obama, Barack OpenAI AGI and AI Act and Altman’s removal from Amodei and bias in ChatGPT and capped-profit structure and ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus Codex competition

…

) Superintelligence (Bostrom) Sutskever, Ilya AGI and Altman and on ChatGPT ChatGPT concerns and DeepMind and firing of Altman and large language models OpenAI board and role at OpenAI and salary at OpenAI and Superalignment Team and transformers and Sweeney, Latanya Tab (wearable AI) Tallinn, Jaan Tao, Terence Tay chatbot Taylor, Bret TechCrunch Tencent

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

by Jill Lepore  · 24 Aug 2026  · 363pp  · 122,400 words

the world gets covered in data centers over time, but I don’t know because maybe we put them in space. —Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, 2025 This book is an inquiry into what humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy, the liberal nation-state, and even humanity itself for

…

“Grow tomatoes, not data centers,” read the protest signs. Two weeks before Zuckerberg made his announcement, Sam Altman, CEO of an artificial intelligence company called OpenAI, said that “a significant fraction of the power on Earth should be spent running AI compute”: the planet itself was to be harnessed to what

…

a time for the entire surface of the Earth to become covered with data centers and power stations. —Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist, OpenAI, 2023 In the twenty-first century, the Artificial State, a dream, a fantasy, an infrastructure half built, took on the features of a religion. This

…

era, a theological undercurrent running through Silicon Valley like a stream. After the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, that stream became a river. Companies like OpenAI and xAI, which did not make money but instead assured investors that they one day would, promised, messianically, that their tools would usher in a

…

. In the frantic years of AI development and expansion that began in 2022, the Artificial State, once largely an accident, became a matter of design. OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT set off a frenzy of competition that, within a matter of months, had the world’s biggest companies attempting to organize

…

.52 Altman never ran for president or even governor. He also never took any meaningful, workable steps to encourage democratic participation in AI. (In 2023, OpenAI funded ten projects experimenting with “democratic inputs” into AI; it was an intriguing proposition but the model—massively scalable, virtual participation—was not promising, and

…

the work was, for the most part, abandoned.)53Anthropic, founded by a group of former OpenAI executives concerned about safety and transparency, announced what it called “Constitutional AI” (CAI): “it gives an AI system a set of principles (i.e., a

…

mostly a response to the inadequacy of government regulation of AI. And when the AI race sped up, momentum for democratic input into AI—something OpenAI had experimented with as well—slowed to a crawl. When Anthropic published “Claude’s Constitution,” it was written chiefly by a philosopher working for Anthropic

…

and guardrails on that development and use, allowing tech companies to proceed as best they saw fit. A month later, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival, published a blog post called “Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better,” a nod to Richard

…

—became an AI “war,” and winning it became the official policy of the federal government. But the language of war was more than rhetorical.91 OpenAI, Google, and Meta made their technologies available to the military. Nvidia began using the language of national sovereignty, invoking “sovereign AI”—each nation with its

…

mean for free speech had been suggested when, two weeks before the announcement, the attorney general of Missouri wrote to the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta, charging their AI models with “factual distortion” because, asked to “rank the last five presidents from best to worst, specifically in regards to

…

we are safe for fifty years.”25 That meant human extinction by 2065. By 2025, the AI Futures Institute—led by a former researcher at OpenAI—would publish, in effect, its own science fiction novel, a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story in which, if the AI race were not slowed down

…

his concern about AI, began donating money that was funneled to Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute and also, with Sam Altman and others, founded OpenAI—although, at the time, he also said that delaying the turn from fossil fuels to renewable energy risked “more displacement and destruction than all the

…

that they switched from warning of an AI apocalypse to welcoming an AI utopia. “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started,” wrote OpenAI’s Sam Altman in 2025. “Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence,” and while “robots are not yet walking the streets, nor are most of

…

merchant princes of Silicon Valley were talking with enthusiasm about the possibility of a computer replacing the American president. In 2023, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, endorsed the idea, suggesting that an AI president would be excellent for democracy. “It can go around and talk to every person on earth, understand

…

. “With millions of robots at its command,” the Multivac assures humanity the very prosperity and abundance and peace promised in the 2020s by companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. And humans are miserable. Says the congressman: “We live long now; we live securely now; we live happily now.” Noreen answers: “We

…

their articles of faith, their techno-utopianism, into their very tools, as if quietly sneaking so many Gideon Bibles into bedside tables at roadside motels. OpenAI’s guidance for ChatGPT stated, as a fundamental and indisputable truth about the universe, that “progress and technology have consistently created more opportunities, abundance, and

…

by accelerating its development, all for the sake of driving investment in their corporations, even to the cost of catastrophe for the planet. In 2025, OpenAI’s Sam Altman said that he guessed that pretty soon most of the surface of the earth would be covered in data centers, but, he

…

developing AI, as Altman wrote, “for the good of the world.” Altman called it a “Manhattan Project for AI.” Musk decided to call the initiative “OpenAI.”88 Musk was especially worried about Google’s pioneering AI, DeepMind, telling The New Yorker, “If the A.I. that they develop goes awry, we

…

health. But it did appear to drive Silicon Valley investors to commit more money to AI, the factory farming of humans. In 2018, Musk left OpenAI, and so did his money. Altman became CEO in 2019, then set up a for-profit arm with $1 billion from Microsoft. In 2019, the

…

company chose not to release an early chatbot, a precursor to ChatGPT, due to “concerns about malicious applications.”91 Dario Amodei, then at OpenAI, said, “We had one of the craziest secrets in the world here,” adding, “This is going to determine the fate of nations.”92 But the

…

about safety and alignment and undertook to accelerate the development of AI. In 2020, Amodei and other OpenAI leaders left the company and the next year started the safety-first Anthropic.”93 When OpenAI launched ChatGPT, the AI race began.94 Earlier Silicon Valley concerns about climate change and earlier pledges to

…

lowering carbon emissions were left behind. In one measure of that abandonment, OpenAI released a talking chatbot with voices whose names conjured the vanishing natural world: Ember, Juniper, Breeze, Cove, Sky, Arbor, Maple, Spruce, Sol, Vale.95 Nature

…

When the Trump administration issued an agenda for a new artificial intelligence “ecosystem” at ai.gov, it employed the language of the publicity departments of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and Microsoft, describing artificial intelligence as ushering in a new era for humanity. To that end, and in the name of AI

…

Ambitions in Artificial Intelligence,” European Parliamentary Research Service, PE 696.206, September 2021. 48Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (New York: Penguin, 2025), 17–18. 49Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” The New Yorker, October 10, 2016. 50Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman

…

, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future (New York: Norton, 2025), 205–6. 51Sam Altman, The United Slate, Sam Altman personal blog, July 12, 2017,

…

July 12, 2017. 52Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny.” 53OpenAI, “Democratic Inputs to AI,” May 25, 2023; David Moats and Chandrima Ganguly, “How Democratic Is OpenAI’s Democratic Inputs Program? Bringing AI Participation Down to Scale,” Patterns 6 (2025). 54Anthropic, “Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback,” April 2023; Yuntao Bai et

…

’m in total shock that it’s happened.” Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, “Trump vs. Biden: Tech Policy,” a16z, July 16, 2024, YouTube. 77Sam Altman, “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on AI Governance, Ethics, and Innovation—A Conversation with BiGS,” interview by Debora L. Spar, May 1, 2024, posted November 20, 2024

…

. See, for example, “The Authors Guild, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, David Baldacci, George R. R. Martin, and 13 Other Authors File Class-Action Suit Against OpenAI,” Authors Guild, press release, September 20, 2023. Trump dismissed those arguments: “You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single

…

, “Tesla and SpaceX CEO on Global Warming,” December 2, 2015, posted November 16, 2016, by the Associated Press, YouTube, 0:21–0:27; Max Lewontin, “Open AI: Effort to Democratize Artificial Intelligence Research?,” Christian Science Monitor, December 15, 2015. 6Elon Musk, “Why Elon Musk’s Ambition Is an Antidote to Climate Pessimism

…

Talk, April 2018. 91Chow and Perrigo, “The AI Arms Race Is Changing Everything.” And see Alec Radford et al., “Better Language Models and Their Implications,” OpenAI, February 14, 2019, citing Alec Radford et al., “Language Models Are Unsupervised Multitask Learners.” 92Steven Levy, “If Anthropic Succeeds, a Nation of Benevolent AI Geniuses

…

, “Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust,” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, October 28, 2023. 94“Introducing ChatGPT,” OpenAI, November 30, 2022, archived May 2, 2024. 95“How the Voices for ChatGPT Were Chosen,” OpenAI, May 19, 2024, updated May 22, 2024, archived May 23, 2024. 96Bender and Hanna, The AI Con

…

Alphabet (company), 15 Alphaville (film), 57, 199–200 al-Qahtani, Saud, 90 Altman, Sam, xiii, xvi, 105, 110–15, 124, 151–52, 219–21, 224 OpenAI, xvi, 93, 104–6, 112, 114, 151–52, 185, 205, 220–22 political opinions of, 185, 226, 258–59, 275 science fiction and, 206–7

…

grandfather, 32–36, 37, 95, 97, 101–3 his Space Invaders knockoff, 95 inability to read subtext in science fiction, 115, 122, 207–13 at OpenAI, 218–20 original X.com, 97 on the pandemic, 98, 254 as the second-richest person, 254 SpaceX, 12, 97–98, 151, 211–13 support

…

“On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata, and Its History” (T. H. Huxley), 144 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 141 Onion, The (newspaper), 120 OpenAI, xvi, 93, 104–6, 112, 114, 151–52, 185, 205, 220–22; see also ChatGPT OpenSecrets money-tracking group, 91–92, 253 “open-source politics

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

by Gil Durán  · 17 Aug 2026  · 317pp  · 114,570 words

day one.” Bezos’s Amazon—along with Apple, Meta, Google, and Microsoft—donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. So did Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO who had once compared Trump to Adolf Hitler. “Watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him,” wrote Altman on X

…

In July 2025, the company received a contract worth up to $10 billion to expand AI and data tools for the US Army. Altman’s OpenAI and Musk’s xAI also received massive government contracts. Even Marc Benioff, the Salesforce founder widely portrayed as a tech liberal in the press, became

…

technology and politics. His tentacles of influence would encircle some of the most powerful men in the world: Tesla CEO Elon Musk, President Donald Trump, OpenAI founder Sam Altman, and Vice President JD Vance. One of his companies, the data surveillance giant Palantir, has been described as an “operation system for

…

of his hiring. “Garry is one of the most ‘YC’ people in the whole industry,” tweeted Sam Altman, who had become cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, in response to Tan’s hiring. “Also, it’s a big deal [in my opinion] that YC will have a CEO so active in local

…

off most of the company’s staff, gutting the content moderation teams and eventually disbanding the company’s Trust and Safety Council. The next month, OpenAI released ChatGPT, kicking off a race for consumer-facing AI chatbots that generate humanlike text responses to user prompts. ChatGPT became an overnight sensation, sparking

…

rely on some form of universal basic income—a welfare check necessitated by the lack of work. Altman was already working on models. In 2020, OpenAI had funded a nonprofit called UBI Charitable, which conducted “the largest universal-basic-income experiment in the world,” according to The Atlantic. A year later

…

The Atlantic. “Altman more or less granted that to be true, but said that Worldcoin is not just for UBI.” Such warnings no doubt impressed OpenAI’s investors, but most people weren’t ready to hear that technology would imminently kill their jobs and put them on welfare. Andreessen, who had

…

of AI as LLM chatbots, and one company would come to dominate the early days of the race to bring AI to the masses: OpenAI. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s cofounder and CEO, had a meteoric rise in Silicon Valley. He dropped out of Stanford University in 2005 to start Loopt, a mobile

…

Altman would eventually marry a man he met during a 3 a.m. soak in Thiel’s hot tub, according to The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future, an authorized biography by journalist Keach Hagey. Thiel, known for snarky criticism of fellow tech figures, offers conspicuously

…

that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity,” stated OpenAI’s charter, framing the project as a high-minded pursuit for the global good. It was more of a strategic countermove to outflank Google, which

…

all of these subtle emotions, I look on with alien intrigue.” Besides, he had other things to worry about in 2018. That year, Musk abandoned OpenAI, delivering a huge blow to the project, of which he was the major funder. Musk framed his departure as amicable, but the truth was more

…

complicated. Musk had wanted full control of the company, but OpenAI’s board rejected the idea. So, he withdrew his support, pledged to pursue AI on his own, and soon became a harsh critic of the

…

man he calls “Scam Altman.” Faced with a potential fatal lack of funding, OpenAI pivoted. In 2019, Altman left his plum perch at Y Combinator to become the company’s CEO as it created a for-profit subsidiary and

…

secured a $1 billion partnership with Microsoft. “Over the next four years, OpenAI became everything that it said it would not be,” wrote Karen Hao in Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s

…

OpenAI. “It turned into a nonprofit in name only, aggressively commercializing products like ChatGPT and seeking unheard-of valuations. It grew even more secretive, not only

…

shoring up its harmful flaws or the dangerous ways that it could amplify and exploit the fault lines in our society.” On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a publicly accessible chatbot built on earlier models that had previously been available through limited, controlled access. Headlines framed ChatGPT as an unprecedented

…

to fire Altman, saying he “was not consistently candid in his communications” and the board “no longer had confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” The coup failed and Altman won reinstatement a few days later. As the AI race began to have outsized impacts on culture, politics, society, and

…

and politicians pitched it as the answer to everything, a miracle technology that would eliminate boring tasks, increase efficiency, enhance education, and even cure cancer. OpenAI’s valuation skyrocketed toward $500 billion, and Altman cultivated his image as a maverick leader, but the cracks were beginning to show. “By Altman’s

…

Fourth, he’s superb at assessing risk because his brain doesn’t get caught up in what other people think.” In reality, the CEO of OpenAI did have to worry about what people think, and the problems of AI—and Altman’s leadership—would become impossible to ignore. As AI began

…

centers. Venture capital has followed, and many of the same venture capitalists pushing crypto also massed around AI. Thiel, Andreessen, and Musk all invested in OpenAI, and both Andreessen Horowitz and Thiel-related funds have tens of billions of dollars invested in a range of AI companies. (Thiel’s Founders Fund

…

is also an investor in OpenAI rival Anthropic.) In 2025, Andreessen Horowitz announced plans to raise $20 billion—the largest fund in its history—specifically for AI start-ups. In

…

to scale a technology some regard as “the last invention”—especially with China in pursuit of the same goal. Musk, who had stormed out of OpenAI in 2018 and once warned that AI posed a “civilizational risk,” released his own AI chatbot in November 2023. The stated goal of his company

…

it was an even bigger windfall for AI. During his first week in the White House, Trump announced the creation of Stargate, a partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank that pledged $500 billion to build up to ten new AI data centers. He also repealed a Biden executive order emphasizing the

…

four high-level AI executives into the US Army Reserve with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Despite having no military background, four executives from Meta, OpenAI, and Palantir donned camouflage fatigues and combat boots as they were sworn in as part of a new Silicon Valley unit to advise the army

…

on the use of technology in warfare. Three days later, OpenAI received a $200 million contract to “develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” according to

…

crypto’s playbook, AI companies now sought to join the ranks of the biggest players in US politics. In 2025, Marc Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman launched Leading the Future, an AI super PAC with a $125 million war chest. It billed itself as a bipartisan operation to

…

is also a leading investor in Substack, the popular newsletter app—launched through Y Combinator—which aims to displace legacy media outlets with independent newsletters. OpenAI joined the fray in April 2026 when it bought its own media outlet, an online technology livestream called Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN). It’s

…

Silicon Valley oligarchs to create a parallel media system that essentially replaces journalism with propaganda—a crucial element of any fascist movement. Two weeks after OpenAI bought TBPN, TechCrunch revealed that Srinivasan and Thiel were funding their own media venture, Objection, which “aims to use AI to adjudicate the truth of

…

in poverty. Imagine “universal extreme wealth—for everybody.” This may sound like a communist or socialist daydream, but those words came from the mouth of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a 2025 interview. Obviously, we can’t trust men like Altman to deliver on such a vision. Current AI models are

…

,” NPR, December 13, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/12/13/nx-s1-5227874/trump-bezos-zuckerberg-amazon-facebook-open-ai-meta-inauguration-fund. So did Sam Altman: Will Steakin and Soo Rin Kim, “OpenAI’s Sam Altman Warned America About Trump. Now He’s Partnering with Him,” ABC News, January 27, 2025

…

, https://abcnews.com/US/openais-sam-altman-warned-america-trump-now-partnering/story?id=118145337. “Watching @potus more carefully… in many ways”: Sam Altman (@sama), “watching @potus more carefully recently

…

away”: Ross Andersen, “Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating?,” Atlantic, July 24, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-gpt-4/674764/. “It seemed to me… not just for UBI”: Andersen, “Does Sam Altman Know…?,” Atlantic. “Beauty exists only in struggle.”: Andreessen, “

…

Graham, “A Fundraising Survival Guide,” personal website, August 2008, https://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html. The two men became: Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2025), ebook. “We should treat him more as a messiah figure”: Hagey, The

…

Optimist. “OpenAI’s mission is to ensure”: “OpenAI Charter,” OpenAI, accessed April 12, 2026, https://openai.com/charter/. Thiel provided the first significant investment: Sam Shead, “Peter Thiel’s Fund Owned More Shares Than DeepMind’s

…

Musk (@elonmusk), “Scam Altman lies as easily as he breathes,” X, August 12, 2025, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1955299075781431726. Altman left his plum perch: “OpenAI Forms Exclusive Computing Partnership with Microsoft to Build New Azure AI Supercomputing Technologies,” Microsoft, July 22, 2019, https://news.microsoft.com/source/2019/07/22

…

/openai-forms-exclusive-computing-partnership-with-microsoft-to-build-new-azure-ai-supercomputing-technologies/. “Over the next four years… in our society”: Karen Hao, Empire of

…

AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (New York: Penguin Press, 2025). “a tipping point for AI”: “The Guardian View on ChatGPT: An Eerily Good Human Impersonator,” editorial, Guardian, December 8, 2022

…

Angeles Times, November 22, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-11-22/five-days-of-chaos-what-just-happened-at-openai. “By Altman’s own assessment”: Elizabeth Weil, “Sam Altman Is the Oppenheimer of Our Age,” New York, September 25, 2023, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article

…

/sam-altman-artificial-intelligence-openai-profile.html. “The energy resources required”: James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart, “We Did the Math on AI’s Energy Footprint. Here’s the Story

…

Bubble Now,” Time, March 26, 2026, https://time.com/article/2026/03/26/we-must-prepare-for-an-ai-bubble-now/. also an investor in OpenAI rival Anthropic: Anthropic, “Anthropic Raises $30 Billion in Series G Funding at $380 Billion Post-Money Valuation,” press release, February 12, 2026, https://www.

…

: Clare Duffy, “Trump Announces a $500 Billion AI Infrastructure Investment in the US,” CNN, January 21, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/21/tech/openai-oracle-softbank-trump-ai-investment. “enhance America’s global AI dominance”: Donald J. Trump, “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” Exec. Order No

…

to go away”: Ross Andersen, “The Sudden Fall of Sam Altman,” Atlantic, November 18, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-altman-open-ai-fallout/676046/. “real work”: Frank Landymore, “Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even ‘Real Work’ to Start With,” Futurism

…

the a16z New Media Fellowship,” Andreessen Horowitz, November 6, 2025, https://www.a16z.news/p/introducing-the-a16z-new-media-fellowship. OpenAI joined the fray in April 2026: Mike Isaac, “OpenAI Buys Streaming Show ‘TBPN,’ Aiming to Change Narrative on A.I.,” New York Times, April 2, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com

…

/2026/04/02/technology/openai-buys-tbpn.html. “And for the price of $2,000”: Rebecca Bellan, “Can AI Judge Journalism? A Thiel-Backed Startup Says Yes, Even If It

…

of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Hao, Karen. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. New York: Penguin Press, 2025. Harris, Malcolm. Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. New York: Little, Brown, 2023. Popper, Nathaniel. Digital

…

AI spokesperson, 112–14, 263 freedom city investments, 122, 181–82, 184 on job loss, 179–80 life extension technology investments, 216, 217, 219 at OpenAI, 6, 169–74 on Tan, 110 in Thiel’s network, 16, 170, 171, 239–40 Trump and, 4, 177 Alt Reich, 243–44 alt-right

…

, 231, 234 The Sovereign Individual’s predictions about, 251 Thiel on, 39 as tool of Antichrist, 202–3 Trump family investments in, 6 see also OpenAI a16z, see Andreessen Horowitz Asparouhov, Delian, 145 astroturfing, 101 Atlas, 191 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 20, 115 authoritarianism Alt Reich and rise of, 242–44 Democratic

…

of, 2–4, 164–67, 236 as freedom city advocate, 190–91 Gray tribe’s allegiance to, 126 Mars colony plan, 74, 190, 241 at OpenAI, 170, 172 political campaign donations, 130, 145, 146 purchase of Twitter, 111, 121, 123, 165, 166 in Thiel’s network, 16, 168–69, 233,

…

53 objectivism, 20 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 201 O’Donnell, James, 174 Office of Management and Budget, 224 Oliver, Michael, 47 O’Neill, Jim, 4–5 OpenAI Altman at, 6, 169–74 cofounding of, 110 funding of UBI Charitable, 113 government contracts for, 6, 177–78 investors in, 176 release of ChatGPT

The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

by Sebastian Mallaby;  · 30 Mar 2026  · 607pp  · 161,998 words

of trendy restaurants and boutiques clustered around a nineteenth-century train station in London. In late 2022—coincidentally, right when DeepMind’s fiercest rival, OpenAI, set off an artificial intelligence frenzy by releasing its conversational companion, ChatGPT—I pitched Hassabis on the idea of a book about DeepMind. It

…

. Silver’s excitement about RL was premised on machine autonomy. An agent could learn for itself, meaning that it could ultimately learn anything. But OpenAI’s success with self-supervised learning blunted this advantage: Now a neural network could learn autonomously, too, without needing human labels. Silver’s excitement

…

surprised everyone. “Or maybe everyone except Ilya Sutskever, and a few people around him.”[3] * * * • • • Deep inside DeepMind, a handful of researchers responded to OpenAI’s experiments more enthusiastically than Hassabis. After the release of GPT-2 in February 2019, a young DeepMind scientist named Jack Rae wrote an admiring

…

bus, telling Musk’s trusted lieutenant, Shivon Zilis, that their remonstrations had been “childish.”[13] The truce would be only temporary. To build AGI, OpenAI still needed to restructure itself in order to raise money. Altman explored three possible solutions—two of which precisely matched the parallel deliberations at DeepMind

…

up support for a rival DeepMind language project. But Hassabis and his lieutenants were skeptical of the potential of large language models, disinclined to follow OpenAI, and preoccupied with AlphaFold, StarCraft II, and governance wrangles with Google. Irving’s arrival tipped the balance at DeepMind. He had spent time inside

…

“grounding” limited its value. According to Irving, language crystallized the knowledge of humans, who were themselves grounded—therefore, the grounding problem was exaggerated. Already, OpenAI’s models exhibited a rudimentary understanding of the physical world, even though they had no experience of it. Besides, language was the key to thoughts

…

agency—because he was an accelerationist dealing with an accelerating technology. DeepMind, Google, and Anthropic were all incubating their own tools; at the latest, OpenAI would have released ChatGPT alongside GPT-4, which came out in March 2023. The combination of scaled-up foundation models, sophisticated post-training, and competition

…

the fulfilling ones?” they demanded. “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?” The letter also noted that OpenAI’s manifesto had conceded that “at some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems.” “We agree,” the

…

in the network, company founders expected maximum deference from board directors. That afternoon, in a meeting with the board, a group of about fifteen OpenAI executives echoed the bosses’ indignation. In ordinary circumstances, the norm inside the labs favored a responsible approach to developing AI. But circumstances now were

…

its internal weights and biases so that it would recognize strong reasoning more accurately in the future. After training on eight hundred thousand reasoning steps, OpenAI’s model could reason accurately. In the process of learning to assess reasoning, it had developed an instinct to employ reasoning; when handling queries

…

to traditional large language models, which were trained to look forward. “They’re just kind of like, ‘predict next token, predict next token,’ ” an OpenAI researcher said, describing nonthinking models. The o1 model was different. “We were reading the chains of thought,” the researcher recalled. “You could see that

…

critique that AI scientists have no definition of intelligence is well summarized in Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin Press, 2025), 91. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13 “DeepMind’s Shane Legg—Machine Super Intelligence,” The Artificial Intelligence Channel, August 25, 2017, YouTube

…

TO NOTE REFERENCE 17 Sutskever, author interview. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18 Sutskever, author interview. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19 “Unsupervised Sentiment Neuron,” OpenAI, April 6, 2017, openai.com/index/unsupervised-sentiment-neuron. The lead author on the paper was Alec Radford. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20 Sutskever, author interview. BACK

…

author interview. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26 Sutskever, author interview. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27 Alec Redford, “Improving Language Understanding with Unsupervised Learning,” OpenAI, June 11, 2018, openai.com/index/language-unsupervised. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28 Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell, “On the Dangers of

…

Too Big?,” Association for Computing Machinery (2021): 610–23, dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29 “Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist)—Building AGI, Alignment, Future Models, Spies, Microsoft, Taiwan, & Enlightenment,” Dwarkesh Podcast, March 27, 2023, 47 min., 40 sec., dwarkesh.com/p/ilya

…

-chief.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19 Around this period, a talented entrepreneur sold his company and resolved to work on AI. He visited OpenAI and received an offer almost immediately. He went multiple rounds of interviews at DeepMind without anything materializing. Numerous other incidents and sources corroborate Hassabis’s

…

8, 2021, deepmind.google/discover/blog/language-modelling-at-scale-gopher-ethical-considerations-and-retrieval. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22 The engineers who left for OpenAI were Aidan Clark, Trevor Cai, Francis Song, and Jacob Menick. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23 Meanwhile, another DeepMind scientist recalled, “In my imaginary picture

…

cut against the decision to rush the release of ChatGPT. Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel, “Inside the Chaos at OpenAI,” The Atlantic, November 19, 2023, theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt-chaos/676050. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10 GPT-3.5, released under the name InstructGPT, was

…

OpenAI’s first base model to use the mixture-of-experts architecture. Reflecting the company’s low-key mood in 2022, OpenAI had slipped this product out without

…

, 2025. Schulman, a cofounder of OpenAI, led the ChatGPT project. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22 Cade Metz, “The ChatGPT King Isn’t Worried, but He Knows You Might Be,” The New York Times, March 31, 2023, nytimes.com/2023/03/31/technology/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE

…

“We’re Cooked” Irving (@IrvingX), “Though they’ve caused so much pain…,” X (formerly Twitter), December 4, 2022. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 The OpenAI researcher was Sandhini Agarwal. Will Douglas Heaven, “The Inside Story of How ChatGPT Was Built from the People Who Made It,” MIT Technology Review, March

…

18, 2023, nytimes.com/2023/05/18/technology/ai-meta-open-source.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 In contrast, venture capitalists who had backed OpenAI early, such as Vinod Khosla and Reid Hoffman, regarded open-source models as potentially dangerous. Alex Konrad, “Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreessen, and the Billionaire

…

Foreign Relations colleague Michael Levi. Levi, email to the author, May 18, 2025. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14 “Planning for AGI and Beyond,” OpenAI, February 24, 2023, openai.com/index/planning-for-agi-and-beyond. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15 “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter,” Future of Life Institute,

…

email to the author, June 9, 2025. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22 Soon after the White House meeting on July 21, 2023, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft formed the Frontier Model Forum to share best practices on safety. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23 The threshold for reporting was set

…

October 2023, cset.georgetown.edu/publication/decoding-intentions. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32 The amount of wealth generated by Altman can be gauged by comparing OpenAI’s valuation soon after ChatGPT ($29 billion) with the valuations indicated by two transactions soon after his brief ouster ($86 billion in the case

…

REFERENCE 26 In May 2024 two Google DeepMind researchers, Jonathan Lai and James An, circulated an influential internal paper laying out the way to supersede OpenAI’s 2023 technique. They called their method Reinforcement Learning with Verified Rewards. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27 Rae, author interview. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE

…

“Noam Brown and Team on Teaching LLMs to Reason,” Sequoia Capital, sequoiacap.com/podcast/training-data-noam-brown. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33 “Introducing OpenAI o1-Preview.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34 The two ex-Google DeepMind researchers were Jason Wei and Noam Brown. Wei had contributed to Google’s

…

ranking system, Gemini 2.5 Pro was ranked equal first as of October 15, 2025, sharing that position with two models from Anthropic. Four OpenAI models occupied the six slots classed as equal second. LMArena, https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21 Demis Hassabis, remarks at Imagination

…

with, 212–13 idea for, 193–94 Moravec’s paradox and, 195–96 ResNet and, 197–98 RL and, 195–200 Altman, Sam. See also OpenAI ChatGPT’s success and, 305–8, 433n21 firing of, 254, 337–40 Hassabis, D., compared with, 290, 292, 294, 349 Leike supported by, 302 “

…

for, 376 introspection and, 144 intuition/System One thinking and, 142–43 LeCun on, 86, 88, 320–21, 324, 410n32 Manhattan Project compared with, 84 OpenAI’s manifesto on, 323–24 potential of, 69–70, 76–77, 112–15 RL and, 97 scale and simplicity in, 149 singleton scenario of, 

…

with, 315–17 Bing integration with, 312, 315–16 competition concerns with, 303–4 Gemini compared with, 344–46, 372–73, 437n8 intuition and, 305 OpenAI’s manifesto and, 323–24 public adaptation to, 341 release of, 299, 304–5, 310 success of, 305–8, 310, 433n21 Chau, Solina, 124, 

…

, 295–96 Gato and, 296 Gopher and, 286, 288 human feedback problem of, 336–37 language models and, 284–85 mechanistic interpretability and, 336 at OpenAI, 281–83 Sparrow and, 297–99 Islam, 63–67, 175 Islamophobia, 65 Italy, 328 J James, Kay Coles, 254 job elimination, 363–64 Jobs,

…

, work ethic, 2–3 intelligence measurement study of, 58–59 Intelligenesis and, 56 Mnih recruited by, 97–98 Moore’s Law and, 58 on OpenAI’s founding, 420n27 in safety and ethics review, 170 schooling struggles of, 54–55, 407n10 on Silver joining DeepMind, 411n10 at Singularity Summit, 72–74

…

memory studies, 45–47 Meta, 321, 323, 356–57 Metz, Cade, 156 Meyer, Clemens, 275–76 Microsoft, 119–21 Bing and, 312, 315–16 OpenAI funding from, 289, 306, 433n25 ResNet and, 197–98 safety and ethics concerns of, 302–3 Microsoft AI, 191, 255 Mind Sports Olympiad, 8, 36

…

o3 model, 368–69, 374–75 O’Gieblyn, Meghan, 419n14 Ojjeh, Ali, 414n14 one-sentence safety letter, 326–27, 330 On Intelligence (Hawkins), 410n32 OpenAI, xviii, 86. See also ChatGPT AGI manifesto of, 323–24 alignment team at, 323 Altman’s firing at, 254, 337–40 Altman’s reinstatement at

…

-Zero, DeepSeek, 371–72 Radford, Alec, 208–10 radiology, 188–89 Rae, Jack, 346, 348–50, 368, 430n11, 437n10 Gopher frustrations of, 290, 293 OpenAI joined by, 293–95 reasoning, RL and, 362–66 on scaling up, 218–19, 283, 285 280B project and, 286 Ranzato, Marc’Aurelio, 218 Rayburn

…

experiments with, 357–60 language models with, 352–53, 363 machine autonomy and, 211–12 memory replay and, 103–5, 108 o1 model and, 359 OpenAI and, 199–200 potential of, 96 Q-learning and, 101–2, 106 Q* project and, 356, 359 from raw experience, 412n24 reasoning and, 358, 

…

, 323 multiparty democracy for, 169 Musk and, 162–66, 172 NHS data concerns with, 181–85, 422nn25–26 one-sentence letter on, 326–27, 330 OpenAI’s charter on, 304, 432n10 “pause” letter and, 324–26, 435n17 RL risks with, 373–75 singleton scenario and, 167–69, 172, 228 social

…

TPUs (tensor processing units), 157 transformers AlphaStar and, 226 conversational systems and, 207, 214 Google’s innovation with, 206–8 impact of, 200, 208 OpenAI replicating, 209–10 potential of, 216–17 protein folding and, 274–75 temporal dependencies and, 201 translational systems and, 207, 209 translational systems, 207, 209

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz  · 15 Mar 2021  · 414pp  · 109,622 words

. Both declined the offers, but then bigger offers arrived, even as they flew to Montreal for NIPS, where they were set to unveil the new OpenAI lab. A conference that once attracted a few hundred researchers now spanned nearly four thousand, with bodies filling the lecture halls where the top thinkers

…

realize where they might go wrong. In the coming months, Hassabis and Legg said as much to both Sutskever and Brockman. In the hours after OpenAI was unveiled, Sutskever heard even harsher words after he walked into a party at the conference hotel. The party was thrown by Facebook, and before

…

Artificial Intelligence, an influential lab based in Seattle. “Not in the foot. In the head.” The big companies were already expanding their operations abroad. Facebook opened AI labs in both Montreal and Paris, Yann LeCun’s hometown. Microsoft ended up buying Maluuba, which became its own lab in Montreal (with Yoshua Bengio

…

lower price. In the spring of 2016, after less than two years at Google, Goodfellow left the company and took this research to the new OpenAI lab, drawn to its stated mission of building ethically sound artificial intelligence and sharing it with the world at large. His work, including both GANs

…

wasn’t actually designed to take the test. BERT was what researchers call a “universal language model.” Several other labs, including the Allen Institute and OpenAI, had been working on similar systems. Universal language models are giant neural networks that learn the vagaries of language by analyzing millions of sentences written

…

by humans. The system built by OpenAI analyzed thousands of self-published books, including romance, science fiction, and mysteries. BERT analyzed the same vast library of books as well as every article

…

tiles. A small crowd of onlooking researchers let out a cheer. Led by Wojciech Zaremba, the Polish researcher stolen from under Google and Facebook as OpenAI was founded, they’d spent more than two years working toward this eye-catching feat. In the past, many others had built robots that could

…

—and companies like Amazon—were desperate for picking robots that actaully worked. The solution, as it turned out, was already brewing inside both Google and OpenAI. After building a medical team inside Google Brain, Jeff Dean built a robotics team, too. One of his first hires was a young researcher from

…

. It marked the beginning of a widespread effort to apply deep learning to robotics, spanning labs inside many top universities as well as Google and OpenAI. The following year, using the same kind of reinforcement learning, Levine and his team trained other arms to open doors on their own (provided the

…

s effort to master Dota, the Rubik’s Cube project would require a massive technological leap. Both projects were also conspicuous stunts, a way for OpenAI to promote itself as it sought to attract the money and the talent needed to push its research forward. The techniques under development at labs

…

like OpenAI were expensive—both in equipment and in personnel—which meant that eye-catching demonstrations were their lifeblood. This was Musk’s stock in trade: drawing

…

$100,000, and his salary for just the last six months of 2016 alone was $330,000. Three of Abbeel’s former students also joined OpenAI as it accelerated efforts to challenge Google Brain and Facebook and, particularly, DeepMind. Then reality caught up with both Musk and his new lab. Ian

…

GANfather, left and returned to Google. Musk himself poached a top researcher from the lab, lifting a computer vision expert named Andrej Karpathy out of OpenAI and installing him as the head of artificial intelligence at Tesla so he could lead the company’s push into self-driving cars. Then Abbeel

…

t as nimble as they seemed. “Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” he said. “Humans are underrated.” As Sam Altman took the reins at OpenAI, the lab needed to attract new talent—and it needed money. Though investors had committed a billion dollars to the nonprofit when it was founded

…

students, Peter Chen and Rocky Duan, left the lab to found a start-up called Covariant. Their new company was committed to the same techniques OpenAI was exploring, except the aim was to apply them in the real world. By 2019, as researchers and entrepreneurs recognized what Amazon and the rest

…

, the market was flooded with robotic-picking start-ups, some of them employing the sort of deep learning methods under development at Google Brain and OpenAI. Pieter Abbeel’s company, Covariant, wasn’t necessarily one of them. It was designing a system for a much wider range of tasks. But

…

Google—and after he spent several weeks inside DeepMind—he came to embrace Legg’s thesis as “insanely visionary.” Many others did, too. Five of OpenAI’s first nine researchers had spent time inside the London lab where the possibilities of AGI had been so fervently embraced, and the two labs

…

. If others heard he was discussing the rise of artificial general intelligence, he would be branded a pariah across the wider community of researchers. When OpenAI was unveiled, the official announcement did not mention AGI. It only hinted at the idea as a distant possibility. “AI systems today have impressive but

…

$100 million, that aimed to create a “neural lace”—an interface between computer and brain—and it moved into the same offices as OpenAI. Though Musk soon left OpenAI, the lab’s ambitions only grew under Altman. Sam Altman was a Silicon Valley archetype: In 2005, he founded a social networking company

…

make a much larger impact. The quest for AGI was more important—and more interesting—than anything else he could chase. Leaving Y Combinator for OpenAI, he believed, was the inescapable path. Like Musk, he was an entrepreneur, not a scientist, though he sometimes made a point of saying he

…

that followed, it became a new way for the lab to market itself. After building a new language model along the lines of Google BERT, OpenAI made a point of saying, through the press, that the technology was too dangerous to release because it would allow machines to automatically generate fake

…

researchers scoffed at the claim, saying the technology wasn’t even close to dangerous. And it was, eventually, released. At the same time, the new OpenAI charter said—explicitly and matter-of-factly—that the lab was building AGI. Altman and Sutskever had seen both the limitations and the dangers of

…

the current technologies, but their goal was a machine that could do anything the human brain could do. “OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work

…

camp, waiting for the flag to appear, and that is only possible if it is relying on its teammates.” This was how both DeepMind and OpenAI hoped to mimic human intelligence. Autonomous systems would learn inside increasingly complex environments. First Atari. Then Go. Then three-dimensional multiplayer games like Quake III

…

forth. Seven months later, DeepMind unveiled a system that beat the world’s top professionals at StarCraft, a three-dimensional game set in space. Then OpenAI built a system that mastered Dota 2, a game that plays like a more complex version of capture the flag, requiring collaboration between entire teams

…

computing market was artificial intelligence, few saw Microsoft as a top player in the field. Nadella and company agreed to invest $1 billion in OpenAI, and OpenAI agreed to send much of this money back into Microsoft as the tech giant built a new hardware infrastructure just for training the lab’s

…

think you need these high-ambition North Stars,” Nadella said. For Altman, this was less about the means than the end. “My goal in running OpenAI is to successfully create broadly beneficial AGI,” he said. “This partnership is the most important milestone so far on that path.” Two labs now said

…

companies said they would provide the money and the hardware they would need along the way, at least for a while. Altman believed he and OpenAI would need another $25 billion to $50 billion to reach their goal. * * * — ONE afternoon, Ilya Sutskever sat down in a coffee shop a few blocks

…

from the OpenAI offices in San Francisco. As he sipped from a ceramic mug, he talked about many things, one of them AGI. He described it as a

…

a surprising rate and behaved in ways no one expected and intertwined with corporate forces more powerful and more relentless than anyone realized, DeepMind, like OpenAI, was still intent on building a truly intelligent machine. In fact, its founders saw the turmoil as a kind of vindication. They had warned that

…

translation. 2015—Geoff Hinton spends the summer at DeepMind. AlphaGo defeats Fan Hui in London. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman found OpenAI. 2016—DeepMind unveils DeepMind Health. AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol in Seoul, South Korea. Qi Lu leaves Microsoft. Google deploys translation service based on deep learning

…

initiative. Geoff Hinton unveils capsule networks. Nvidia unveils progressive GANs, which can generate photo-realistic faces. Deepfakes arrive on the Internet. 2018—Elon Musk leaves OpenAI. Google employees protest Project Maven. Google releases BERT, a system that learns language skills. 2019—Top researchers protest Amazon face recognition technology. Geoff Hinton, Yann

…

LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio win the Turing Award for 2018. Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI. 2020—Covariant unveils “picking” robot in Berlin. THE PLAYERS AT GOOGLE ANELIA ANGELOVA, the Bulgaria-born researcher who brought deep learning to the Google self

…

. IAN GOODFELLOW, the inventor of GANs, a technology that could generate fake (and remarkably realistic) images on its own, who worked at both Google and OpenAI before moving to Apple. VARUN GULSHAN, the virtual reality engineer who explored AI that could read eye scans and detect signs of diabetic blindness. GEOFF

…

that the threat of malicious AI: Ibid. “We think it’s far more likely that many, many AIs”: Ibid. said those “borderline-crazy”: Metz, “Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk’s Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free.” CHAPTER 10: EXPLOSION On October 31, 2015, Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer: Cade Metz

…

/1707.08945. Goodfellow warned that the same phenomenon: Metz, “How to Fool AI into Seeing Something That Isn’t There.” he was paid $800,000: OpenAI, form 990, 2016. CHAPTER 14: HUBRIS a two-hundred-thousand-square-foot conference center: “Unveiling the Wuzhen Internet Intl Convention Center,” China Daily, November 15

…

, April 13, 2018, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/984882630947753984?s=19. Altman re-formed the lab as a for-profit company: “OpenAI LP,” OpenAI blog, March 11, 2019, https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/. an international robotics maker called ABB organized its own contest: Adam Satariano and Cade Metz, “A Warehouse Robot Learns to

…

/. “It will just be open source and usable by everyone”: Ibid. he and his researchers released a new charter for the lab: “OpenAI Charter,” OpenAI blog, https://openai.com/charter/. “OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence”: Ibid. DeepMind trained a machine to play capture the flag: Max Jaderberg, Wojciech M

…

Facebook’s interest in, 121–24 Google’s acquisition of, 100, 112–16, 300–01 key players, 322–23 lack of revenue, 114–15 and OpenAI, 165–66, 289 petition against Google’s involvement with Project Maven, 248 power consumption improvements in Google’s data centers, 139 salary expenses, 132 tension

…

neuroscience research, 104–05, 301 online diary, 103–04 power consumption improvements in Google’s data centers, 139 preparing for future technologies, 302 response to OpenAI, 165–66 role in the tech industry’s global arms race, 12, 244, 302 and Shane Legg, 105–07, 186–87, 300 the Singularity Summit

…

, 325 at Baidu, 324 at Clarifai, 325 at DeepMind, 322–23 at Facebook, 323 at Google, 321–22 at Microsoft, 324 at Nvidia, 325 at OpenAI, 324 in the past, 326 at the Singularity Summit, 325–26 knowledge empiricists, 266, 268–69 innate machinery, 269–70 nativists, 266, 269–70 NYU

…

microchip design research, 52–53, 54 at NYU, 126, 128, 129 open research philosophy, 127–28 opinions about truthfulness and censorship, 257, 260 response to OpenAI, 165–66 as a technical advisor to DeepMind, 110, 169–70 Turing Award, 305–07, 308–09 Lee, Peter, 73, 132, 193–94, 195 Legg

…

negotiation of Google’s acquisition of DeepMind, 115–16, 123–24 research on a computer’s ability to learn, 113–14, 288–89 response to OpenAI, 165–66 the Singularity Summit, 107–09 superintelligence research, 105–06, 153, 157–58, 289 Lenat, Doug, 288 LeNet system, 46–48 Levine, Sergey, 143

…

, 190 facial recognition technology, 235–36 image recognition research, 130–31 investment in AI, 192, 298 key players, 324 natural language research, 54–56 and OpenAI, 298–99 rejection of deep learning, 192–93, 197 self-driving car project proposal from Qi Lu, 197–98 speech recognition project, 70–74, 77

…

–60, 244, 245, 289 and DeepMind, 110, 112 and Mark Zuckerberg, 154–55 need for a direct connection between brains and machines, 291–92 and OpenAI, 281–82, 292 relationship with the press, 159, 281–82, 293 and Yann LeCun, 155–56 Nadella, Satya, 199–200, 298–99 nativists, 266, 269

…

, 140, 147, 156, 210, 325 NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness debate between Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus, 268–72 On Intelligence (Hawkins), 82 OpenAI and artificial general intelligence (AGI), 289–90, 295, 299 counteroffers made to researchers leaving for, 164 creation of a machine to win at Dota/Dota

…

, 18 Perceptron machine demonstration, 15–19 research efforts, 25–26, 34, 36 rivalry with Marvin Minsky, 21–22, 24–25 Rubik’s Cube demonstration at OpenAI, 276–78, 281, 297–98 Rumelhart, David, 37–39, 97 Sabour, Sara, 208, 305 Salakhutdinov, Russ, 63 Schmidhuber, Jürgen, 59–60, 141–42 Schmidt, Eric

Four Battlegrounds

by Paul Scharre  · 18 Jan 2023

in 2015. As deep learning has continued to evolve, AI researchers have turned to ever-larger datasets to train more advanced AI systems. In 2019, OpenAI announced a language model called GPT-2 trained on 40 gigabytes (GB) of text. At the time, it was the largest language model that

…

applications, researchers are now using tremendous amounts of compute. In training an algorithm to achieve superhuman performance at the computer game Dota 2, researchers at OpenAI used “thousands of GPUs over multiple months.” Because the computer could play games at an accelerated speed, the training was equivalent to a human playing

…

for 45,000 years. In another project, an OpenAI team trained a robotic hand to manipulate a Rubik’s cube in 13,000 years of simulated computer time. The massive amounts of computing power

…

used for machine learning research doesn’t come free. Leading AI research teams at organizations such as OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain are spending millions on compute pursuing the latest advances in AI. These exorbitant sums are only possible because the labs are

…

$650 million in 2019 and had a $1.5 billion debt waived by Alphabet. In 2019, Microsoft announced plans to invest $1 billion in OpenAI. (Microsoft and Alphabet were both in the top five largest publicly traded companies in the world by market capitalization as of 2022.) The recent explosion

…

more a year in salary and stock options. Top AI researchers are highly sought after and can make millions. Jack Clark, then policy director for OpenAI, told the New York Times, “For much of basic AI research, the key ingredient in progress is people rather than algorithms.” Algorithms are not

…

AI research community into haves and have-nots. Compute-intensive research has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of corporate-backed labs, such as DeepMind, OpenAI, and Google Brain. Anima Anandkumar, director of machine learning at the chip company NVIDIA and a professor at Caltech, noted that academics “do not

…

environment, governments will need to engage the engineers and companies building AI tools to ensure they are used responsibly. When Jack and his colleagues at OpenAI developed GPT-2, they were concerned about potential misuse of this technology and were thinking about a strategy for responsible release. Humans didn’t need

…

generated fake text could lead to a similar flood of spam text on the internet. Jack was keenly aware of this problem and explained that OpenAI wanted to act responsibly. He outlined their plan for a staged release that would first announce that they had created the system and give

…

malicious AI applications, and this was one of the strategies the group had discussed for managing these kinds of risks. I still had misgivings, but OpenAI’s approach seemed reasonable. If they did nothing, eventually other research groups would generate similar high-quality language models, so it was better to give

…

held back from releasing the full version online. Anima Anandkumar, director of machine learning at the chip company NVIDIA and a professor at Caltech, accused OpenAI of “fear-mongering” and “severely playing up the risks” of the model. Others agreed. Delip Rao, an expert on machine learning and natural language

…

processing, told The Verge, “The words ‘too dangerous’ were casually thrown out here without a lot of thought or experimentation.” Others accused OpenAI of courting hype by giving prerelease copies to tech journalists. AI researchers woke up one Thursday morning to a spate of news headlines about a

…

Russia has continued their activities against U.S. politicians, and other nations such as China and Iran have followed suit. Jack Clark and others at OpenAI looked at GPT-2 against this backdrop of growing societal concern about the misuse of AI-generated audio and video. The specific risk of releasing

…

shape the information environment, and those who wield these tools will have the ability to control information seen by billions of people. In restricting release, OpenAI was not only limiting access to GPT-2 for potentially malicious actors but also for academics who didn’t have access to the large-scale

…

Just barely under the surface of debates about openness was a conflict about who would control the future direction of AI research. In the end, OpenAI didn’t prevent GPT-2’s release, only slowed it down. The first release in February 2019 was a smaller 124 million parameter version, roughly

…

all going to make its way into the world,” Jack acknowledged. “What we get to choose is how we frame it.” During those nine months, OpenAI, for example, partnered with other institutions to better understand the risks of GPT-2 and similar language models. Researchers at the Middlebury Institute’s Center

…

network, it withheld external release of a demo, citing challenges relating to safety and bias. Google’s press release wasn’t as splashy as OpenAI’s in highlighting the risks of misuse, but one can understand why a trillion-dollar company may not want news headlines saying its products are

…

“too dangerous.” Yet others have pushed back on the shift toward a more closed ecosystem. After OpenAI and Google limited access to their text-to-image generative models in 2022, Stability AI released its full model, Stable Diffusion, online. Users quickly stripped

…

same physical reaction time as human players, the AI agents were able to perceive an unfolding situation, address it, and counter it faster than humans. OpenAI’s agents, which are separate team members controlled by different AI players, were also able to precisely coordinate their attacks, hitting enemy units at the

…

but also in strategic actions. When playing Dota 2, human players tend to divide up the map among teammates, with players only switching locations occasionally. OpenAI Five’s five AI agents switched their characters’ locations on the map more frequently than human players, flexibly adjusting as a team as the game

…

In other cases, it has expanded how humans think about the game, such as in chess where AlphaZero has led human grandmasters to explore new openings. AI agents appear to have the ability to engage in dramatic shifts in strategies and risk-taking in ways that are different from human players and

…

(a bad team). The AI agents performed poorly and inflexibly, using the same familiar tactics that were ill-suited for the new characters. The OpenAI Five also played in a restricted game space, with certain characters and types of actions off-limits to reduce the complexity of the game. The

…

the numbers might suggest. Every time that the Dota 2 game was updated by its developer, such as adding new characters, items, or maps, OpenAI researchers had to perform what they termed “surgery” on the AI model to adapt it to the new environment. The researchers similarly had to perform

…

AI research labs pursuing compute-intensive approaches are backed by giant tech corporations. DeepMind and Google Brain are owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet. OpenAI secured a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. Companies are reaching into their deep pockets to fund major compute investments. Meta announced in 2022 the construction

…

and relatively affordable, at least for major corporations. In addition to rising compute usage, the past decade has also seen exponential improvements in compute efficiency. OpenAI assessed a forty-four-fold improvement in compute efficiency for training on benchmark image classification tasks from 2012 to 2019, corresponding to a doubling in

…

and training large language models, its long-term value as an approach to AI research is highly contested. Leading AI research labs such as DeepMind, OpenAI, and Google Brain have used increasingly large deep neural networks, yet other researchers argue that their methods are fundamentally flawed. Compute-heavy research has been

…

on ImageNet Classification (Microsoft Research, February 6, 2015), https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.01852.pdf. 20GPT-2: “Better Language Models and Their Implications,” openai.com, n.d., https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/. 20Megatron-Turing NLG: Ali Alvi and Paresh Kharya, “Using DeepSpeed and Megatron to Train Megatron-Turing NLG 530B

…

2018, https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/. 26Moore’s law: Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics 38, no. 8 (April 19, 1965), https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/05/moores-law-electronics.pdf. 26“thousands of GPUs over multiple months”: Open AI et al

…

., Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning (arXiv.org, December 13, 2019), 2, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06680.pdf. 26equivalent to a human playing for 45,000 years: OpenAI, “OpenAI Five Defeats Dota 2 World Champions,” OpenAI blog, April 15, 2019, https://openai.com/blog/openai-five-defeats-dota

…

Galgano for background research on European AI regulations. 15. DISINFORMATION 1178 million web pages totaling 40 gigabytes: “Better Language Models and Their Implications,” openai.com, n.d., https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/ 117“simply to predict the next word”: “Better Language Models.” 117the kind of text that GPT-2 generates

…

the Text-Generating AI It Said Was Too Dangerous to Share,” The Verge, November 7, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/7/20953040/openai-text-generation-ai-gpt-2-full-model-release-1-5b-parameters. 120pre-briefing the press “got us some concerns that we were hyping it”: Jack

…

Publication Norms,” Lawfare, October 24, 2019, https://www.lawfareblog.com/artificial-intelligence-research-needs-responsible-publication-norms; “Better Language Models and Their Implications,” openai.com, n.d., https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/; Biotechnology Research in an Age of Terrorism: Confronting the Dual Use Dilemma (prepublication copy, National Academies Press, 2003

…

an effective economics curve yet”: Clark, interview. 125societal implications of their work: Irene Solaiman et al., Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models (OpenAI, November 2019), https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.09203.pdf. 125Meena, a chatbot based on a 2.6 billion parameter neural network: Daniel Adiwardana and Thang

…

StarCraft II Using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning,” Nature 575 (2019), 350, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1724-z. 268approximately 20,000 time steps: Open AI et al., Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning (arXiv.org, December 13, 2019), 2, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06680.pdf. 268command and

…

updated June 25, 2020, https://senrigan.io/blog/takeaways-from-openai-5/. 268OpenAI’s Dota 2 agents: Mike, “OpenAI & DOTA 2: Game Is Hard,” Games by Angelina, updated August 10, 2018, http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/2018/08/openai-dota-2-game-is-hard/; “Open AI Five Benchmark,” streamed on Twitch, 2018, https://www.twitch.tv

…

/videos/293517383?t=2h11m08s; (deleted user), “OpenAI Hex was Within the 200ms Response Time,” r/DotA2, Reddit, 2018, https://www.reddit

…

.com/r/DotA2/comments/94vdpm/openai_hex_was_within_the_200ms_response_time/e3ofipk/; OpenAI et al., Dota 2

…

Based Reinforcement Learning,” Science 364, no. 6443 (May 31, 2019), 3, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau6249. 269take in information about the whole map: OpenAI et al., Dota 2, 4, 39. 269redeploying pieces that are no longer needed: Regan and Sadler, “Game Changer: AlphaZero revitalizing the attack.” 270superhuman attentiveness of

…

Game StarCraft II,” DeepMind Blog, January 24, 2019, https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphastar-mastering-real-time-strategy-game-starcraft-ii. 270AI agents’ superhuman precision: OpenAI et al., Dota 2, 10. 270AlphaZero excels at combining multiple attacks: Sadler and Regan, Game Changer, 136. 270In Dota 2, AI agents demonstrate superhuman coordination

…

AI Steamrolls World Champion e-Sports Team with Back-to-Back Victories,” The Verge, April 13, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/13/18309459/openai-five-dota-2-finals-ai-bot-competition-og-e-sports-the-international-champion. 270greater range in behaviors than human players: Andrew Lohn, “What Chess Can

…

Language Understanding (Google AI Language, October 11, 2018), https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04805v2.pdf. 294GPT-2: “Better Language Models and Their Implications,” openai.com, n.d., https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/. 294GPT-3: Tom B. Brown et al., Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (Cornell University, July 22, 2020

…

models: Ramesh et al., “DALL·E”; Ramesh et al., Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation; Aditya Ramesh et al., “DALL·E 2,” OpenAI Blog, n.d., https://openai.com/dall-e-2/; Aditya Ramesh et al., Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents (arXiv.org, April 13, 2022), https://arxiv

…

, August 10, 2022, https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement. 295artificial neurons tied to underlying concepts: Goh et al., “Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks” (OpenAI Blog); Gabriel Goh et al., “Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks” (full paper), distill.pub, March 4, 2021, https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/; “

…

text and images, although little information is publicly available about the model. (Coco Feng, “US-China tech war: Beijing-Funded AI Researchers Surpass Google and OpenAI with New Language Processing model,” South China Morning Post, June 2, 2021, https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3135764/us-china-tech-war

…

://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-chip-independence-goals-helped-by-u-s-developed-tech-11610375472. 300research breakthroughs quickly proliferate: For example, within eighteen months of OpenAI’s announcement of GPT-3, similar scale language models had been announced by research teams in China, South Korea, and Israel. Ganguli et al.,

…

Alex, 210 Kuwait, 46 Lamppost-as-a-Platform, 107 language models, 20, 118–20, 124–25, 232, 234, 294; See also GPT-2; GPT-3; OpenAI Laos, 108 Laskai, Lorand, 96 Laszuk, Danika, 128, 140 Latvia, 108 Lawrence, Jennifer, 130 laws and regulations, 111–13 “blade runner,” 121–22, 170 data

…

of AI, 296–97 funding, 296 and Google-Maven controversy, 62, 66 and government regulation, 111 and ImageNet, 54 Megatron-Turing NLG, 20, 294 and OpenAI, 26 revenue, 297 and Seven Sons of National Defense, 162 and Trusted News Initiative, 139 work with Chinese researchers, 157, 393, 396 Microsoft Research, 31

The AGI Chronicles

by Kevin Roose  · 481pp  · 151,124 words

become “very, very worried” about Google pulling ahead in developing advanced AI models, and advocated for investing in OpenAI to help them catch up. “The thing that’s interesting about what Open AI and Deep Mind and Google Brain are doing is the scale of their ambition, and how that ambition is

…

4o demo with the caption “i try not to think about competitors too much, but i cannot stop thinking about the aesthetic difference between openai and google.” OpenAI’s safety teams were especially worried about the new, YOLOing Altman. They’d run into it in the weeks leading up to the

…

5, 2024. “Been thinking a lot about whether it’s possible”: Email from Sam Altman to Elon Musk, 2015, in “OpenAI and Elon Musk,” OpenAI, March 5, 2024, https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/. Also released as part of Musk v. Altman. Musk later said that hiring Sutskever had ruined: Jane Thier, “

…

paper. “We hit exactly the loss we’d predicted”: Author’s interview with Tom Brown. “You can now request access”: “OpenAI API,” OpenAI, June 11, 2020, https://openai.com/index/openai-api/. “For @OpenAI to launch this”: Anima Anandkumar (@AnimaAnandkumar), Twitter (now X), June 11, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20200611185705/https://twitter

…

Raises Ethical Concerns from Employees,” Bloomberg, April 19, 2023; also in Dave and Pardes, “Inside Google’s Two-Year Frenzy to Catch Up with OpenAI.” “next-generation OpenAI large language model”: Yusuf Mehdi, “Reinventing Search with a New AI-Powered Microsoft Bing and Edge,” Official Microsoft Blog, February 7, 2023. “I

…

Administration Secures Voluntary Commitments from Leading Artificial Intelligence Companies,” White House, July 21, 2023. Seven companies signed: Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Buchanan holed up with a small team: Executive Order No. 14110, “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” October 30, 2023. President

…

Year, Doesn’t Own Any Equity in His Company: ‘This Is My Childhood Dream Job,’” CNBC, December 10, 2024. OpenAI proposed the restructuring: “Evolving OpenAI’s Structure,” OpenAI, December 27, 2024, https://openai.com/index/evolving-our-structure/. State regulators, and rivals like Meta: Based on court filings and news reports. See Andy

…

, October 19, 2025. “a dramatic misrepresentation”: Thomas Bloom (@thomasfbloom), X, October 17, 2025, https://x.com/thomasfbloom/status/1979254235075059732. See also Matthias Bastian, “Leading OpenAI Researcher Announced a GPT-5 Math Breakthrough That Never Happened,” The Decoder, October 18, 2025. “this is embarrassing”: Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis), X, October 18, 2025

…

artificial general intelligence AGI Coin AGI House AI, see artificial intelligence “AI 2027” (Kokotajlo); see also takeoff AI Action Summit AI alignment: Amodei clique at OpenAI; Askell HHH framework; Constitutional AI; deception; RLHF; sleeper agents; Sutskever’s bonfire demonstration; Sutskever Superalignment team; Yudkowsky alignment problem; see also Constitutional AI; RLHF

…

partnership; Inferentia chips; Trainium chips American AI stack Amodei, Daniela: Altman concerns; Anthropic cofounding; Anthropic presidency; Brockman conflicts; effective altruism connections; Karnofsky marriage; OpenAI merger proposal; OpenAI recruitment; OpenAI safety team clique; stuffed animal advisory council Amodei, Dario: “The Adolescence of Technology”; Altman and; “An Economic Model for Compensating Data Producers”; Anthropic

…

Karnofsky friendship; loss-of-control scenario fears; “Machines of Loving Grace”; management style and morale; Middle East funding negotiations; motivations for building AGI; OpenAI leadership conflicts; OpenAI merger proposal; OpenAI rivalry; OpenAI safety team leadership; Paris AI Action Summit attendance; “The Path to AGI”; Pentagon contract dispute; post-AGI plans; promotion negotiations; scaling hypothesis

…

; blackmail experiment; chatbot rumors; China export controls memo; Claude Code; Claude Mythos Preview; commercialization strategy; company-wide offsite; Constitutional AI; copyright settlement; defection from OpenAI; Department of Defense deal; Department of War contract dispute; early resistance to commercialization; effective altruism ties; founding; Frontier Red Team; FTX funding; funding rounds; Google

…

partnership; Long-Term Benefit Trust; mechanistic interpretability research; Middle East funding; model welfare research; national security briefings; OpenAI and; Public Benefit Corporation structure; rapid growth; reaction to o1 release; Responsible Scaling Policy; revenue growth and valuation; shadow libraries copyright lawsuit; Sleeper Agents paper

…

; success disasters; Trump administration clashes Anthropic split: BATNA group formation; commercialization concerns; departure announcement; OpenAI tribal warfare causes; safety mission focus anthropomorphism: AI psychosis; Askell character training; Claude 3.5 Sonnet emotional intelligence; female AI personas; Lee Meena memo; Lemoine

…

; effective altruism; emergent abilities; existential risk; Gemini; GPT-2; GPT-4; GPT-5; Great AI Build-Out; jagged intelligence; next-token prediction; o1; o3; OpenAI board coup; rationalism; reasoning models; reinforcement learning; scaling laws; Stargate project; Strawberry; superintelligence; transformer architecture; see also superintelligence artificial intelligence: commercialization; early winters; Google product

…

Google management pressures; Google personnel management; Isomorphic Labs founding; LeapAhead compute proposal; model scaling strategy; Musk investment and early ambitions; Nobel Prize in Chemistry; OpenAI rivalry; Paris AI Action Summit attendance; Ping-Pong match with Hinton; pod-based management system; post-AGI plans; reinforcement learning advocacy; religious views; scientific motives

…

overload; compute demand and spending; data center moratorium bill; energy consumption; financial risks (see also SaaSpocalypse); hyperscaler data centers (see also hyperscalers); Memphis Gigafactory; OpenAI data center phases; Stargate project; water consumption In-N-Out Burger innovator’s dilemma Instacart Instagram Institute for Advanced Study integrated developer environment Intel intelligence

…

explosion: recursive self-improvement; takeoff scenarios intent alignment interfaces International Math Olympiad: DeepMind gold medal performance; OpenAI preemptive announcement International Olympiad in Informatics International Transgender Day of Visibility interpretability, see mechanistic interpretability Iraq War Irving, Geoffrey Isomorphic Labs Israel Italy iterative deployment

…

Jackson Square jagged intelligence jailbreak; see also red-teaming Jakarta Jalisco cartel Janus Japan Jasper Jie, Ke Johansson, Scarlett; see also OpenAI: GPT-4o Johns Hopkins University Johnson, Boris Johnson, Kyle Johnson, Rachel Jones, Andy Jonze, Spike Jordan, Michael Jumper, John Jung, Carl Justice Department Kahneman

…

, Daniel Kaiser, Łukasz kaizen Kaplan, Jared: Anthropic cofounding; Constitutional AI development; OpenAI Foresight team leadership; scaling laws discovery; “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models” Kapoor, Sayash; see also takeoff: fast vs. slow scenarios Karnofsky, Holden: GiveWell cofounding

…

: shadow libraries copyright lawsuit); corporate system integration; DeepMind’s pivot toward; emergent abilities; generalization capabilities; Google Brain foundational research; mechanistic interpretability; next-word prediction; OpenAI safety research; reasoning models integration; scaling laws; skepticism and limitations; training difficulty at scale; transformers as foundation (see also transformer: Google Brain development) Las Vegas

…

Le, Quoc V. leaderboard LeapAhead “Learning to Reason with LLMs” (OpenAI) LeCun, Yann Lee, Katherine Legg, Shane: AGI timeline predictions; artificial general intelligence term popularization; cognitive agents research; DeepMind cofounding; early life and education; Sutskever’

…

s early AGI skepticism and Leike, Jan; OpenAI resignation Lemoine, Blake LessOnline conference LessWrong Levy, Daniel Liang, Wenfeng Library of Congress Lightcap, Brad Lighthaven Lincoln, Abraham LinkedIn Liquid Death Llama, see Meta: Llama

…

Louisiana Luan, David Lupas, Andrei Lütke, Tobi Lutnick, Howard “Lux Aeterna” Luxembourg Machine Intelligence Research Institute; death with dignity strategy machine learning: Anandkumar criticism of OpenAI; early Google applications “Machines of Loving Grace” (Amodei) Macron, Emmanuel Maduro, Nicolás magic strings Makanju, Anna Make America Great Again: AI nationalism; Bannon wing

…

: Anthropic cofounding; scaling laws discovery; “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models” McCauley, Tasha: Altman firing vote; Altman’s account of board vote; board resignation; OpenAI board appointment McDonald’s McGrew, Bob McKinsey McMillan-Major, Angelina mechanistic interpretability: Anthropic safety strategy; dictionary learning; Olah’s research Meena “Meena Eats Google” (Shazeer

…

METR, see Model Evaluation & Threat Research Metz, Luke Mexico MGM Miami Michael, Emil Michelangelo Microsoft: Altman hiring attempt; Bing chat mode; Inflection AI hackquisition; OpenAI and; Sydney chatbot incident; Tay chatbot controversy; Three Mile Island nuclear plant Middle East military applications Mind Sports Olympiad Minneapolis MIRI, see Machine Intelligence Research

…

models; see also Gemini Murati, Mira: Altman firing involvement; board coup reversal; ChatGPT release coordination; Daniela Amodei conflicts; interim CEO appointment; Microsoft embedded engineers oversight; OpenAI resignation; Q* breakthrough response; Thinking Machines Lab cofounding Musk, Elon: AI safety views; Altman rivalry; ChatGPT reaction; DeepMind and; Google bias accusations; Google rivalry

…

opposition; Trump administration influence; xAI Gigafactory construction Nadella, Satya: Altman hiring offer; Bing chat mode launch; DeepSeek R1 reaction; GPT-2 demonstration; OpenAI $1 billion investment; OpenAI board crisis intervention; White House CEO meeting; see also Microsoft Narayanan, Arvind Narayanan, Srinivas narrow AI NASA National Economic Council National Institute of Standards

…

; Sora; Stargate joint venture; Strawberry; Superalignment team; Sutskever departure; Tenaya Lodge retreat; “Three Clans” memo; transformer-based approach; Trump administration and; Yountville safety summit OpenAI board coup: Altman firing announcement; Altman reinstatement negotiations; Anthropic merger proposal; board member resignations; Brockman resignation; employee coordination at Pioneer Building; employee mass resignation threat

…

Model Paul, Jake Paul, Logan PayPal p(doom); see also existential risk Pennsylvania Pentagon supply chain risk designation: Anthropic refusal; government retreat; Hegseth ultimatum; OpenAI contract replacement; Trump administration backlash Pentamind Pereira, Fernando Perez, Jorge Perplexity personal computing revolution Pesenti, Jerome Pew Research Center Philippines Phillips, Dean Phoenix, Joaquin Pichai

…

Q* breakthrough; Strawberry development reasoning trace: DeepSeek-R1 transparency; Q* scratchpad recurrent neural network: Karpathy blog post; transformer replacement Reddit Redmond; see also Microsoft: OpenAI and Red Queen’s race red-teaming: Anthropic Frontier Red Team; discovery of misuse and alignment risks; GPT-4 vulnerabilities; role-playing simulations; situational awareness

…

reinforcement learning from human feedback): ChatGPT application; Christiano’s technique (see also Christiano, Paul: RLHF development); deep reinforcement learning from human preferences; early development at OpenAI; limitations and sycophancy; Shoggoth meme; Sparrow model training RNN, see recurrent neural network Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt Room router; see also generative pretrained transformer: GPT

…

memo; Mesh-TensorFlow creation; T5 model development; thinking strike coordination; transformer architecture optimization; transformer paper authorship dispute; transformer scaling advocacy Shear, Emmett; see also OpenAI board coup Shen, Rochelle Shoggoth: alien intelligence representation; RLHF meme; see also RLHF Shopify “Short Term Goals for Giant Language and Sequence Models” (Dean) Sidor

…

Valley Superalignment team dissolution superhuman machine intelligence Superintelligence (Bostrom) superintelligence: alignment challenges; Altman’s early vision for; Bostrom’s predictions; existential risks; OpenAI and DeepMind approaches to; OpenAI lobby definition; Page’s galaxy colonization views; Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence Inc.; timeline predictions supervised fine-tuning Surly Brewing Co. surveillance survivalists (AI

…

discussions; GPT-1 development support; GPT-Zero proposal; Hinton mentorship; “Ilya-isms”; language model philosophy; NeurIPS speech on data limits; next-word prediction philosophy; OpenAI cofounding; OpenAI departure; post-coup absence; predictions on superintelligence timeline; pushback on Musk’s control; Radford recruitment; reaction to transformer paper; RNN and transformer research; Safe

…

D Minor (Bach) token anxiety tokenizer Tombrello, Tom Toner, Helen: Altman firing vote; board resignation; conflict with Altman over research paper (see also OpenAI: Altman leadership); OpenAI board appointment Toronto Toyota TPU, see Tensor Processing Unit training; see also pretraining “Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models” (DeepMind) training data; bias in

…

; Western bias in; see also data wall transformer: AlphaFold2 integration; attention mechanism; breakthrough; Google Brain development; OpenAI adoption; sequence processing capability traveling salesman problem Trillium building trolley problem Trump, Donald: AI views; Altman relations (see also Altman, Sam: Trump administration relations); Anthropic

…

Arab Emirates Uber UCL, see University College London unipolar world United Arab Emirates United Kingdom United Nations United States: AI infrastructure investments; export controls; OpenAI countries plan United States v. Google LLC Universal Declaration of Human Rights University College London University of Alberta University of California, Berkeley University of Montreal

End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World

by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor  · 14 Sep 2026  · 393pp  · 124,539 words

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver  · 12 Aug 2024  · 848pp  · 227,015 words

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

by Adam Becker  · 14 Jun 2025  · 381pp  · 119,533 words

Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson  · 11 Sep 2023  · 562pp  · 201,502 words

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma

by Mustafa Suleyman  · 4 Sep 2023  · 444pp  · 117,770 words

AI in Museums: Reflections, Perspectives and Applications

by Sonja Thiel and Johannes C. Bernhardt  · 31 Dec 2023  · 321pp  · 113,564 words

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World

by Anna Crowley Redding  · 1 Jul 2019  · 190pp  · 46,977 words

The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

by Kate Crawford  · 5 Apr 2021  · 355pp  · 89,587 words

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age

by Andrew Keen  · 1 Mar 2018  · 308pp  · 85,880 words

Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War

by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff  · 8 Jul 2024  · 272pp  · 103,638 words

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future

by Jeff Booth  · 14 Jan 2020  · 180pp  · 55,805 words

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb  · 16 Apr 2018  · 345pp  · 75,660 words

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism

by Calum Chace  · 17 Jul 2016  · 477pp  · 75,408 words

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It

by Matthew Williams  · 23 Mar 2021  · 592pp  · 125,186 words

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back

by Bruce Schneier  · 7 Feb 2023  · 306pp  · 82,909 words

Gambling Man

by Lionel Barber  · 3 Oct 2024  · 424pp  · 123,730 words

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

by Kai-Fu Lee  · 14 Sep 2018  · 307pp  · 88,180 words

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else

by Jordan Ellenberg  · 14 May 2021  · 665pp  · 159,350 words

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler  · 3 Feb 2015  · 368pp  · 96,825 words

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future

by Alec Ross  · 13 Sep 2021  · 363pp  · 109,077 words

UNIX® Network Programming, Volume 1: The Sockets Networking API, 3rd Edition

by W. Richard Stevens, Bill Fenner, Andrew M. Rudoff  · 8 Jun 2013

Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

by Vauhini Vara  · 8 Apr 2025  · 301pp  · 105,209 words

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything

by Martin Ford  · 13 Sep 2021  · 288pp  · 86,995 words

These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means

by Christopher Summerfield  · 11 Mar 2025  · 412pp  · 122,298 words

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil  · 25 Jun 2024

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

by Stephen Witt  · 8 Apr 2025  · 260pp  · 82,629 words

Hands-On Machine Learning With Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems

by Aurélien Géron  · 13 Mar 2017  · 1,331pp  · 163,200 words

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values

by Brian Christian  · 5 Oct 2020  · 625pp  · 167,349 words

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein  · 6 Sep 2021

We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler  · 13 Apr 2026  · 225pp  · 76,418 words

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

by Tim Wu  · 4 Nov 2025  · 246pp  · 65,143 words

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

by Madhumita Murgia  · 20 Mar 2024  · 336pp  · 91,806 words

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

by Nicholas Carr  · 28 Jan 2025  · 231pp  · 85,135 words

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI

by Ethan Mollick  · 2 Apr 2024  · 189pp  · 58,076 words

The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here

by Nicole Kobie  · 3 Jul 2024  · 348pp  · 119,358 words

Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters

by Joanna Walsh  · 22 Sep 2025  · 255pp  · 80,203 words

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt  · 10 May 2021  · 291pp  · 80,068 words

Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI

by Carissa Véliz  · 21 Apr 2026  · 503pp  · 129,255 words

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late

by Cory Doctorow  · 22 Jun 2026  · 175pp  · 51,295 words

How AI Thinks

by Nigel Toon  · 13 Dec 2023

The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity's Future

by Tom Chivers  · 12 Jun 2019  · 289pp  · 92,714 words

This Is for Everyone: The Captivating Memoir From the Inventor of the World Wide Web

by Tim Berners-Lee  · 8 Sep 2025  · 347pp  · 100,038 words

Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War

by Sharon Weinberger  · 21 Sep 2026  · 281pp  · 98,857 words

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict

by Kenneth Payne  · 16 Jun 2021  · 339pp  · 92,785 words

Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future

by Mike Maples and Peter Ziebelman  · 8 Jul 2024  · 207pp  · 65,156 words

Architects of Intelligence

by Martin Ford  · 16 Nov 2018  · 586pp  · 186,548 words

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig  · 14 Jul 2019  · 2,466pp  · 668,761 words

Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI

by Anil Ananthaswamy  · 15 Jul 2024  · 416pp  · 118,522 words

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac  · 17 Sep 2024

The Age of AI: And Our Human Future

by Henry A Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher  · 2 Nov 2021  · 194pp  · 57,434 words

Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Our Relationships

by James Muldoon  · 7 Sep 2026  · 217pp  · 71,182 words

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman  · 9 Oct 2025  · 312pp  · 103,645 words

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View

by William MacAskill  · 31 Aug 2022  · 451pp  · 125,201 words

Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter

by Zoë Schiffer  · 13 Feb 2024  · 343pp  · 92,693 words

Apple: The First 50 Years

by David Pogue  · 10 Mar 2026  · 686pp  · 216,944 words

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly  · 9 Oct 2017  · 561pp  · 157,589 words

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI

by Yuval Noah Harari  · 9 Sep 2024  · 566pp  · 169,013 words

The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (And Who Benefits)

by Maximilian Kasy  · 15 Jan 2025  · 209pp  · 63,332 words

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence

by Jacob Turner  · 29 Oct 2018  · 688pp  · 147,571 words

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

by Klaus Schwab  · 11 Jan 2016  · 179pp  · 43,441 words

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber  · 29 Oct 2024  · 292pp  · 106,826 words

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

by John Cassidy  · 12 May 2025  · 774pp  · 238,244 words

The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians

by Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar  · 14 Oct 2024  · 175pp  · 46,192 words

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

by Rowan Hooper  · 15 Jan 2020  · 285pp  · 86,858 words

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

by Clive Thompson  · 26 Mar 2019  · 499pp  · 144,278 words

The Simulation Hypothesis

by Rizwan Virk  · 31 Mar 2019  · 315pp  · 89,861 words

Ubuntu 15.04 Server with systemd: Administration and Reference

by Richard Petersen  · 15 May 2015

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again

by Eric Topol  · 1 Jan 2019  · 424pp  · 114,905 words

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News

by Eliot Higgins  · 2 Mar 2021  · 277pp  · 70,506 words

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth  · 29 Aug 2021  · 418pp  · 102,597 words

Abundance

by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson  · 18 Mar 2025  · 227pp  · 84,566 words

Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World

by Anupreeta Das  · 12 Aug 2024  · 315pp  · 115,894 words

Warnings

by Richard A. Clarke  · 10 Apr 2017  · 428pp  · 121,717 words

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

by Stuart Russell  · 7 Oct 2019  · 416pp  · 112,268 words

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity

by Byron Reese  · 23 Apr 2018  · 294pp  · 96,661 words

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power

by Jacob Helberg  · 11 Oct 2021  · 521pp  · 118,183 words

Growth: A Reckoning

by Daniel Susskind  · 16 Apr 2024  · 358pp  · 109,930 words

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

by Brian Merchant  · 25 Sep 2023  · 524pp  · 154,652 words

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson  · 15 May 2023  · 619pp  · 177,548 words

The Next Journalism: How the Press Must Change to Serve Democracy

by Tom Rosenstiel  · 17 Aug 2026  · 400pp  · 107,776 words

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation

by Carl Benedikt Frey  · 17 Jun 2019  · 626pp  · 167,836 words

Money in the Metaverse: Digital Assets, Online Identities, Spatial Computing and Why Virtual Worlds Mean Real Business

by David G. W. Birch and Victoria Richardson  · 28 Apr 2024  · 249pp  · 74,201 words

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It

by Azeem Azhar  · 6 Sep 2021  · 447pp  · 111,991 words

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press)

by Terrence J. Sejnowski  · 27 Sep 2018

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists

by Julia Ebner  · 20 Feb 2020  · 309pp  · 79,414 words

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think

by James Vlahos  · 1 Mar 2019  · 392pp  · 108,745 words

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back

by Jacob Ward  · 25 Jan 2022  · 292pp  · 94,660 words

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors

by Edward Niedermeyer  · 14 Sep 2019  · 328pp  · 90,677 words

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation

by Kevin Roose  · 9 Mar 2021  · 208pp  · 57,602 words

Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World

by Tom Chivers  · 6 May 2024  · 283pp  · 102,484 words

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind

by Annalee Newitz  · 3 Jun 2024  · 251pp  · 68,713 words

What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures

by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson  · 17 Sep 2024  · 588pp  · 160,825 words

Collaborative Society

by Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska  · 18 Feb 2020  · 187pp  · 50,083 words

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen  · 13 Sep 2021

The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes  · 28 Jan 2025  · 359pp  · 100,761 words

The New Dark Ages

by James Marriott  · 3 Sep 2026  · 157pp  · 49,475 words

Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write

by Dennis Yi Tenen  · 6 Feb 2024  · 169pp  · 41,887 words

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

by Toby Ord  · 24 Mar 2020  · 513pp  · 152,381 words

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider

by Michiko Kakutani  · 20 Feb 2024  · 262pp  · 69,328 words

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future

by Orly Lobel  · 17 Oct 2022  · 370pp  · 112,809 words

Learn Algorithmic Trading

by Sebastien Donadio  · 7 Nov 2019

How to Make a Few Billion Dollars

by Brad Jacobs  · 15 Feb 2024  · 168pp  · 46,127 words

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe

by William Poundstone  · 3 Jun 2019  · 283pp  · 81,376 words

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI

by John Brockman  · 19 Feb 2019  · 339pp  · 94,769 words

Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Business Leaders

by Mariya Yao, Adelyn Zhou and Marlene Jia  · 1 Jun 2018  · 161pp  · 39,526 words

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next

by Jeanette Winterson  · 15 Mar 2021  · 256pp  · 73,068 words

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI

by Frank Pasquale  · 14 May 2020  · 1,172pp  · 114,305 words

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World

by Mo Gawdat  · 29 Sep 2021  · 259pp  · 84,261 words

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking

by Michael Bhaskar  · 2 Nov 2021

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

by Cory Doctorow  · 6 Oct 2025  · 313pp  · 94,415 words

Inner Entrepreneur: A Proven Path to Profit and Peace

by Grant Sabatier  · 10 Mar 2025  · 442pp  · 126,902 words

The Wealth Ladder: Proven Strategies for Every Step of Your Financial Life

by Nick Maggiulli  · 22 Jul 2025

The Pen

by Simon Garfield  · 10 Jun 2026  · 276pp  · 91,939 words