‘Both Silicon Valley and Washington are in their imperial era’

Karen Hao describes a company like OpenAI as “modern-day British East India Company.” “The parallels are extremely stark,” said the award-winning reporter who was in conversation with journalist Samanth Subramanian on Sunday at the Bangalore Literature Festival.

Like the East India Company, “they lay claim to resources that are not their own” and “exploit an extraordinary amount of labour,” said Ms Hao, author of Empire of AI.

At the engrossing session, Mr. Subramanian and Ms. Hao, the first journalist to extensively profile OpenAI, delved into various aspects of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

She said that it is really hard to explain to people how OpenAI was not really considered a serious company earlier. “Within the AI world, it was seen as the strange step-child because they had said that ‘we are going to pursue artificial general intelligence’, which as a concept was largely unpopular within the scientific community because it was seen as an almost pseudo-scientific idea,” revealed Ms. Hao, back then a tech reporter at the MIT Technology Review.

At that time, anyone who was talking about AGI was seen as “not a real researcher,” she said, adding that this was also true of many of the people who worked within OpenAI at that time, like Greg Brockman, a tech entrepreneur who had never done AI research in his life, and Sam Altman, a “Stanford dropout (who) thought of being a writer and realised he wasn’t good enough,” said Ms. Hao.

The session also saw a discussion on the founding mythology of AI and provided an insight into how the early private correspondence exchanges between people like Elon Musk, Mr. Altman, and Dario Amodei, indicated that they were less positive about the technology than they are today. “You could sense a real kind of fear, at that time, that AGI or a rogue AI could ruin humanity in some way,” said Mr. Subramanian, wryly adding, “Of course, Mr. Musk has decided to do that himself.”

Another interesting thread that was dissected was the complex financial and political interests of many of the founders of AI companies, and the overlap of these interests with those of the current political dispensation in the U.S.

“It is difficult not to note that the empire of data has been built at the time when there’s been significant backsliding in the U.S., in general, in terms of human rights and free speech,” noted Mr. Subramanian, a view that Ms. Bao agreed with. “Both Silicon Valley and Washington are in their imperial era,” she said.