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Karen Hao on the Empire of AI, AGI evangelists, and the cost of belief
OpenAI’s rise isn’t just a business story — it’s an ideological one. On Equity, Karen Hao, author of Empire AI, explores how the cult of AGI has fueled a billion-dollar race, justified massive spending on compute and data, and blurred the line between mission and profit.
“I was interviewing people whose voices were shaking from the fervor of their beliefs in AGI,” Karen Hao, journalist and bestselling author of “ Empire of AI,” told TechCrunch on a recent episode of Equity. These nebulous promises have fueled the industry’s exponential growth — its massive resource demands, oceans of scraped data, strained energy grids, and willingness to release untested systems into the world. Two former OpenAI safety researchers told TechCrunch that they fear the AI lab has begun to confuse its for-profit and non-profit missions — that because people enjoy using ChatGPT and other products built on LLMs, this ticks the box of benefiting humanity.
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