1KHO 824: The Human Toll of Unchecked Power | Karen Hao, The Empire of AI

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
This episode is sponsored by Fora Travel. I've always been the person people come to for travel advice, whether it's planning a camping trip in northern Michigan, figuring out how to travel well with kids across the country, or finding experiences that actually help families connect instead of just filling an itinerary. I genuinely have loved helping people create meaningful adventures. And I know a lot of you listening are probably that person too. The friend who plans the trip, the one who researches the details, the one person people trust to find the hidden gems and make everything run smoothly. Fora is built for people exactly like that. Fora is a modern travel agency that helps people build their own travel business, no matter what stage of life they're in. You don't need prior experience because Fora gives you the training, technology and support to help you get started. And you're joining a community of people who are building businesses centered around experiences, relationships and helping others travel well. A lot of advisors begin simply by helping people they already know and grow naturally from there. What I also appreciate is that there are no sales quotas or minimums. You can build this at a pace that works for your life and your family. Your next act starts here. Become a Fora advisor today at foratravel.com/1000hours.
That's foratravel.com/1000hours.
And make sure you tell them we sent you foratravel.com/1000hours.
Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. And I have just read a phenomenally good book. It is called Empire of AI. It is a New York Times bestseller, Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI. The author Karen Hao is here. I am so honored and excited to talk to you. Karen, welcome.

**Karen Hao** (1:38)
Thank you so much for having me Ginny.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:41)
This book is masterfully written.
I have so many notes. I learned so much. It opened my eyes to so much. There were so many things that are going on in our world that I didn't know. So can you tell the audience about your history here that you have been researching AI for quite a while as a journalist and you have been in conversations with people at OpenAI for years and years and years. In fact, you were the first journalist to gain extensive access to the company and to write its first profile. You've written about AI and its global impacts for MIT Technology Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and this book is based on over 300 interviews with around 260 people. You have all these fact checkers that you think at the end of the book. This is extensive, but so interesting. I mean, it was such a patron. Karen, I was just blown away.

**Karen Hao** (2:33)
Thank you. That is so incredibly kind. I feel like I have to start a little bit earlier than how I got to open AI and AI with how I even got into journalism because it was a sideways route in. I actually studied engineering at MIT for undergrad and worked in Silicon Valley, and became basically disillusioned with it quite fast. That is what led me to then looking to journalism, and then tech journalism, and then AI journalism, and beginning to report on AI specifically through this lens of what is the impact that this technology is having on society, and how is that impact influenced by who actually develops these technologies and the incentive structures that they exist within, and then the incentive structures that they create themselves. And so, as I was reporting on AI beginning in 2018 all the way to present day, those were the questions that continued to pull me, because what I saw when I was working in Silicon Valley was the fact that the innovation ecosystem is pretty broken. It doesn't really result in technologies that work for the public interest. And we're starting to see that happen again with AI, because it's the same exact innovation ecosystem that brought us social media, that brought us all of these other technology platforms that we feel challenged by as a society now.
And so, that is the beating heart of the questions that I ask in the book is, how do we actually develop AI, but also generally how do we develop technologies in the public interest, and how do we make sure that something this consequential is beneficial for everyone, like the tech companies say, but aren't actually doing. And I use open AI as the window through which to explore all of these questions about money, power, incentives, structures, technology development. And the reason is because it's the company that is most important to AI development. Their product, ChatGPT, was the way that the entire world was introduced to AI. Many of the decisions that they made in those halls of power still have ripple effects on the shape of this technology and people's perceptions of this technology to this day.