lost his lawsuit<\/a>, in which he accused his former partner of breaching a non-profit contract by shifting OpenAI to a commercial enterprise. But the trial was a distraction anyway, says Hao. What she really wanted people to pay attention to was how we got here, and what we need to do next.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"Sam](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/e1c8774b-264f-422c-91d3-ec1f9ba0b9f2.jpg\")
Sam Altman won his court case against Elon Musk last weekNathan Howard\/Bloomberg\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
When Hao first arrived at OpenAI\u2019s offices in San Francisco in 2019, the company\u2019s chief technology officer greeted her with a tentative smile. \u201cWe\u2019ve never given someone so much access before,\u201d Greg Brockman told Hao, inviting her to embed herself in their company for a profile piece she was writing.<\/p>\n
Two weeks earlier, on July 22, 2019, OpenAI had received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. For Hao, a young technology reporter who had studied engineering and worked for a Silicon Valley start-up before joining the magazine\u00a0MIT Technology Review, it was a career-defining opportunity. It was also the moment that the scales fell from her eyes. \u201cRight off the bat, I started realising that something was not right,\u201d says Hao, 32.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hao had become a bit of a cynic after spending too much time around Silicon Valley start-ups masquerading as noble endeavours. But OpenAI, which had been founded in 2015, was supposed to be different. It was a non-profit that had dedicated itself to developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), the most powerful form of AI yet conceived. The idea was that this superintelligence could replicate, and then surpass, human intelligence. In OpenAI\u2019s telling, it could become powerful enough to destroy the world, or to create global utopia, solving problems humanity wasn\u2019t smart enough to. They wanted it to become the latter, and OpenAI would be a transparent and collaborative tool to enable the world to get there.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hao was surprised to find, then, what she considered a distinct lack of transparency. She was chaperoned everywhere. She wasn\u2019t allowed to visit certain floors or attend certain meetings. \u201cAs I was talking to researchers, I noticed that they kept being very nervous about saying things they weren\u2019t supposed to, which was bizarre, because the entire premise of OpenAI was they were going to share everything,\u201d says Hao.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A security guard was given a picture of her face and told to be on the lookout if she appeared unapproved on the premises. Employees were warned on Slack not to speak to Hao beyond \u201csanctioned conversations\u201d. The atmosphere was \u201ccompetitive, secretive and insular\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Speaking to insiders later on, she would hear how what had begun as an organisation throwing ideas at the wall \u201cto see what stuck\u201d had been transformed under Altman\u2019s singular obsession: to achieve AGI before everyone else. This included competitors, such as Google, but also states, such as China.<\/p>\n
Its scientists and researchers were some of the brightest minds in the industry. But, Hao says, their belief in AGI was something more akin to a religious fervour. She calls it \u201cthe ideological pursuit of the machine god\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Several former OpenAI employees told Hao about a retreat in the hills of the Sierra Nevada mountains where senior scientists, dressed in bathrobes, sat around a firepit at a sprawling lodge and watched as Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI\u2019s brilliant and eccentric chief scientist, burnt an effigy \u201crepresenting AGI\u201d. Friends who joined the company described to her how it was only after leaving that they \u201ccame back down to earth\u201d.<\/p>\n
![\"India's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/e045662a-c3d4-4574-b6b3-a3c5f702387e.jpg\")
India\u2019s prime minister Narendra Modi with Sam Altman and the head of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, at an AI summit in New Delhi this yearLudovic MARIN\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Hao claims that there was paranoia about company secrets being leaked and spies getting in. Sutskever once mused to colleagues about what he ought to do if his hand were cut off to be used in a palm scanner for unlocking OpenAI\u2019s secrets, Hao writes in her book. He proposed building a secure containment facility, a \u201cbunker\u201d within which would be a computer totally disconnected from any network. Another executive, Dario Amodei, used a disconnected computer to write critical strategy documents, connecting it directly to a printer so he could circulate only physical copies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What most disillusioned Hao, however, was how this relentless pursuit of superintelligence was moulding the company and the industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n
OpenAI decided that the best way to achieve AGI was to take its large language models (LLMs) and dramatically scale them up. This meant \u201cpouring ever more data into them and training them on supercomputers larger than anyone has ever built in human history\u201d, says Hao. All this new processing power cost money, and OpenAI began a for-profit arm in order to find it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to overstate how much this idea of scale was considered a scientific extreme at the time,\u201d says Hao, who describes it as a \u201cbrute force\u201d approach.<\/p>\n
Until this point, AI research had been much more targeted. Scientists used small and limited data sets to test hypotheses about what artificially intelligent machine learning could do, such as detecting signs of Alzheimer\u2019s by feeding it datasets of brain scans. Now, it was about feeding as much data to the AI as possible in the hope of it developing \u201cintelligence\u201d in any field. The results were increasingly fluent models which seemed impressive, although some were sceptical whether this represented novel problem-solving and true intelligence. Nonetheless, OpenAI\u2019s competitors raced to upgrade or create their own LLMs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve seen this collapsing of the entire AI field and the entire industry towards a singular approach that is intellectually extremely lazy and societally deeply harmful,\u201d argues Hao.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of the things that we see in terms of the negative impacts of AI come from this scaling idea.\u201d<\/p>\n
The vast, water-consumptive data centres popping up all over the world, driving up local energy prices, are a result of AI companies feeding LLMs more and more data in an effort to expand their knowledge base. Meanwhile, companies trawling the internet for morsels of information on which to train them has eroded our privacy and intellectual property, Hao argues.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the beginning, OpenAI focused on \u201cclean data\u201d \u2014 authoritative texts such as peer-reviewed research papers, she says. But they quickly ran out. So they began scraping the web for the dirty stuff, hoovering up data from sources such as social media and online forums. This could be anything from a review of a restaurant to someone arguing that the Earth is flat on Reddit. This poor quality data created poor quality results \u2014 flawed chatbots spitting out half-truths and conspiracies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This may paint a gloomy picture, but Hao is adamant that she is not an AI \u201cdoomer\u201d. The answer to all this, she says, is not that we should stop the progress of AI, which would mean shutting down a world of possibilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe could still rapidly advance AI, just in a different direction,\u201d says Hao. We need to develop more targeted AI. This wouldn\u2019t require huge reserves of computing power, or massive amounts of indiscriminate data. It would simply mean having more specific aims, such as using AI to discover new drugs by feeding it small and specific datasets, and testing the results with rigorous scientific research. It might not create something superintelligent, but you couldn\u2019t argue it wouldn\u2019t benefit humanity, says Hao, and without the unintended consequences.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, for her, it all boils down to the question she asked OpenAI\u2019s executives in 2019 on her first day in the office. It was one which they struggled to answer, says Hao, and which, seven years later, she is still asking: why choose to aim for human-surpassing superintelligence at all?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Empire of AI: Inside the reckless race for total domination is published by Penguin\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the last three weeks the world has watched as two of the world\u2019s richest men, Elon Musk…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600507,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-600506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}