And the third feature is that the empires monopolize knowledge production. So, in the last 10 years, we’ve seen the AI industry monopolize more and more of the AI researchers in the world. So AI researchers are no longer contributing to open science, working in universities or independent institutions, and the effect on the research is what you would imagine would happen if most of the climate scientists in the world were being bankrolled by oil and gas companies. You would not be getting a clear picture, and we are not getting a clear picture, of the limitations of these technologies, or if there are better ways to develop these technologies.
And the fourth and final feature is that empires always engage in this aggressive race rhetoric, where there are good empires and evil empires. And they, the good empire, have to be strong enough to beat back the evil empire, and that is why they should have unfettered license to consume all of these resources and exploit all of this labor. And if the evil empire gets the technology first, humanity goes to hell. But if the good empire gets the technology first, they’ll civilize the world, and humanity gets to go to heaven. So on many different levels, like the empire theme, I felt like it was the most comprehensive way to name exactly how these companies operate, and exactly what their impacts are on the world.
Niall Firth: Yeah, brilliant. I mean, you talk about the evil empire. What happens if the evil empire gets it first? And what I mentioned at the top is AGI. For me, it’s almost like the extra character in the book all the way through. It’s sort of looming over everything, like the ghost at the feast, sort of saying like, this is the thing that motivates everything at OpenAI. This is the thing we’ve got to get to before anyone else gets to it.
There’s a bit in the book about how they’re talking internally at OpenAI, like, we’ve got to make sure that AGI is in US hands where it’s safe versus like anywhere else. And some of the international staff are openly like—that’s kind of a weird way to frame it, isn’t it? Why is the US version of AGI better than others?
So tell us a bit about how it drives what they do. And AGI isn’t an inevitable fact that’s just happening anyway, is it? It’s not even a thing yet.
Karen Hao: There’s not even consensus around whether or not it’s even possible or what it even is. There was recently a New York Times story by Cade Metz that was citing a survey of long-standing AI researchers in the field, and 75% of them still think that we don’t have the techniques yet for reaching AGI, whatever that means. And the most classic definition or understanding of what AGI is, is being able to fully recreate human intelligence in software. But the problem is, we also don’t have scientific consensus around what human intelligence is. And so one of the aspects that I talk about a lot in the book is that, when there is a vacuum of shared meaning around this term, and what it would look like, when would we have arrived at it? What capabilities should we be evaluating these systems on to determine that we’ve gotten there? It can basically just be whatever OpenAI wants.
So it’s kind of just this ever-present goalpost that keeps shifting, depending on where the company wants to go. You know, they have a full range, a variety of different definitions that they’ve used throughout the years. In fact, they even have a joke internally: If you ask 13 OpenAI researchers what AGI is, you’ll get 15 definitions. So they are kind of self-aware that this is not really a real term and it doesn’t really have that much meaning.
But it does serve this purpose of creating a kind of quasi-religious fervor around what they’re doing, where people think that they have to keep driving towards this horizon, and that one day when they get there, it’s going to have a civilizationally transformative impact. And therefore, what else should you be working on in your life, but this? And who else should be working on it, but you?
