ApsûVoyage of a Thousand Books
Chart of the Sea of Books
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Who is this book for?
- People who use ChatGPT every day but do not know how it is made
- Readers who care about tech-company power, labor, and environmental issues
- People who want to understand how OpenAI went from a nonprofit to a giant corporation
- People who doubt the claim that "AI will benefit all of humanity" and want to see the other side
Who is the author?
- Karen Hao, American journalist, formerly senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review and a Hong Kong-based reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and now a contributor to publications such as The Atlantic
- She has long reported on AI research, tech ethics, and the effects of AI on society, and worked on the podcast In Machines We Trust
- The book's English title is Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, published in 2025
Other Books（本書為作者第一本著作）
Reading notes
🔒 Arrive at Lofoten and visit the White-tailed Eagle to unlock this
Sail to LofotenFrom Nonprofit Ideal to For-Profit Enterprise
Karen Hao traces how OpenAI went from an idealistic nonprofit to a company valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. When founded, it promised to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) would benefit all of humanity, but this nonprofit structure soon became unsustainable.
After Musk left in 2018, a funding gap appeared, and the leadership created a for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI LP, under the original nonprofit. In 2019, Microsoft invested one billion dollars and obtained exclusive licensing and priority access to the technology, which the author sees as the point of no return: the company's focus shifted from scientific research to commercial interests.
Altman and "Growth Is Everything"
The Faith in Scale: Bigger Is Smarter
Why Call It an "Empire"
The Invisible Data Workers
The 2023 Board Storm
From Open to Closed: How Belief Becomes Power
Another Path: Small, Respectful AI
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The Sea of Books has 16 real islands, one for each subject. Every building on an island is a book.
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