book

Empire of AI

by Karen Hao

Karen Hao, who began covering OpenAI in 2019, reconstructs its turn from safety-first nonprofit to scale-at-all-costs empire, then follows the bill off campus — to the low-paid data workers across the Global South, the chips, and the energy the models consume. The most thoroughly reported account of the company that set the terms of the AI race; read it against Supremacy for the boardroom view.