News Summary

• Karen Hao, author of “Empire of AI,” likens the AI industry in general, and OpenAI in particular, to an empire.
• In her book, Hao also documents workers in developing countries like Kenya and Venezuela who were exposed to disturbing content, including child sexual abuse material.
• Hao says it’s a false trade-off to pit AI progress against harms, especially when other forms of AI offer real benefits.
• She said the best way to guarantee speed was to take existing techniques and “just do the intellectually cheap thing, which is to pump more data, more supercomputers, into those existing techniques”