Amir H. Payberah - 2026-08-15

We resume our book club after a long summer break with Empire of AI by Karen Hao, the story of OpenAI and the development of ChatGPT.

Karen Hao, in this book, shows how OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit organization with the mission of developing AI "for the benefit of humanity", eventually became one of the most powerful companies in the AI industry. She also shows how the ambitions of the company's leaders and the intense competition in the tech industry led them to overlook many of the real risks of AI and focus mainly on winning the race to build the best LLMs. As the book shows, for Sam Altman and many of OpenAI's leaders, there was only one path to success, and it was building bigger models and using more data. This approach is reflected in their repeated message, "scale, scale, scale", which reflects a masculine culture centered on scale and domination.

A common way to think critically about AI is to ask whether it is really "serving humanity". This is an important question, but the book approaches the issue from a different angle by focusing on the relationship between AI and power, a perspective that also resonates with the principles of Data Feminism. From this perspective, data and AI are forms of power, and that power is not distributed fairly around the world. So the key question is how to challenge this concentration of power. However, according to the book, large AI companies concentrate power in three main ways: by concentrating knowledge, resources, and influence.

I believe that as long as this concentration of power continues, serious concerns about the future of AI will remain.