Everyone is busy building intelligence, but no one can define what it is

American journalist and author Karen Hao spent years reporting from inside and around OpenAI, and what she found was less a portrait of a company and more an autopsy of the larger idea of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

OpenAI was founded on the premise that if AGI was coming regardless, it was better to have safety and ethics-conscious researchers at the frontier than to cede it to those with fewer compunctions. The CEO, Sam Altman, even went as far as to design the company’s board such that it could fire him too if he ever came in the way of its core mission. That board, briefly did fire him, but reversed the decision quickly. Hao traces this arc not as a scandal, but as something inevitable; as an outcome of the ideas that come from Silicon Valley founders who have vast resources and the freedom to push boundaries. OpenAI is described in the early chapters of her book, Empire of AI, as “a rare intellectual playground without strings attached, a haven for fringe ideas.” By the time she finished reporting, it had become one of the most powerful and least accountable corporations on earth.