AI Whistleblower: We Are Being Gaslit By The AI Companies! They’re Hiding The Truth About AI

**Steven Bartlett** (0:00)
A huge number of businesses have spent the last few years adopting AI, and my company, steven.com, is no different. But here's the thing, most companies actually have no idea whether or not it's working for them. Their teams might be using AI, they might be spending money on AI, and their leaders might be telling the board that they are an AI-enabled business, but they'd also likely struggle to explain where in the business AI is helping. The issue is there's no easy way to see whether it's delivering value or working effectively unless you're using our sponsor, Liridin, which runs seamlessly as a browser plugin or desktop agent and shows you exactly how AI is being used across your organization, what it's actually producing, and where the real opportunities in your business are. That way, you're able to make data-backed decisions instead of just guessing all the time. I love anything that kills the guesswork. So if you want to be a company that's informed with your use of AI and accelerate your company's AI transformation, head to liridin.com and book a demo now. That's larridin.com and book a demo now.

**Karen Hao** (1:01)
So much of what's happening today in the AI industry is extremely inhumane.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:06)
But this is me playing devil's advocate. And logically, it could be the case that the civilization that accelerate their research with AI is going to be the superior civilization.

**Karen Hao** (1:14)
No, it's not. This is a prediction that you're making, right?

**Steven Bartlett** (1:17)
Elon's making, Zuckerberg's making, Altman's making.

**Karen Hao** (1:20)
And do you know what the common feature of all of them is? They profit enormously off of this myth. You know, I have all of these internal documents showing that they're purposely trying to create that feeling within the public so that they can extract and exploit and extract and exploit.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:33)
So what do we do about it?

**Karen Hao** (1:34)
We need to break up the empires of AI. You know, I've been covering the tech industry for over eight years. Interviewed over 250 people, including former or current OpenAI employees and executives. And I can tell you that there are many parallels between the empires of AI and the empires of old, right? Like, lay claim to the intellectual property of artists, writers and creators in the pursuit of training these models. Second, they exploit an extraordinary amount of labor, which breaks the career ladder because someone gets laid off. And then they work to train the models on the very job that they were just laid off in, which will then perpetuate more layoffs if that model then develops that skill. And when they talk about that there's going to be some new jobs created that we can't even imagine, a lot of the jobs that are created are way worse than the jobs that were there. And then there's the environmental and public health crisis that these companies have created. And how they're able to also spend hundreds of millions to try and kill every possible piece of legislation that gets in their way and will censor researchers that are inconvenient to the empire's agenda. But what I'm saying is not that these technologies don't have utility, it's that the production of these technologies right now is exacting a lot of harm on people. But we have research that shows that the very same capabilities could be developed in a different way that doesn't have all of these unintended consequences.
So let's talk about all of that.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:54)
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Karen Hao, you've written this book in front of me here called Empire Of AI, Dreams And Nightmares In Sam Altman's OpenAI. I guess my first question is what is the research and the journey you went on in order to write this book we're going to talk about and the subjects within it today?

**Karen Hao** (3:45)
I took a strange route into journalism. I studied mechanical engineering at MIT. And so when I graduated, I moved to San Francisco. I joined a tech startup. I became part of Silicon Valley. And I basically received an education in what Silicon Valley is about because a few months into joining a very mission-driven startup that was focused on building technologies that would help facilitate the fight against climate change, the board fired the CEO because the company was not profitable. And this was, in hindsight, a very pivotal moment for me because I thought if this hub is ultimately geared towards building profitable technologies, and many of the problems in the world that I think need solved are not profitable problems like climate change, then what are we actually doing here? Like, how did we get to a point where innovation is not actually necessarily working in the public benefit and sometimes even undermining the public benefit in pursuit of profit? In that moment, I had a bit of a crisis where I thought, well, I just spent four years trying to set myself up for this career that I now don't think I am cut out for. And I thought, well, I might as well just try something totally different. I've always liked writing. And that's how after two years, I landed at a role at MIT Technology Review covering AI full-time. And that gave me a space to then explore all of these questions of who gets to decide what technologies we build, how does money and ideology also drive the production of those technologies, and how do we ultimately make sure that we actually reimagine the innovation ecosystem to work for a broad base of people all around the world. And so that is kind of how I then set off on this journey of ultimately writing a book. I didn't realize that I was working towards writing a book, but starting in 2018 when I took that job was essentially the moment in which I began researching the story that I document in it.