RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINES

"Empire of Al" author Karen Hao on the reckless arrogance of our Silicon Valley overlords

- AL LETSON

I use AI to proofread, and it scares me. Are we nearing the “singularity,” where we can no longer control it?

It’s such a good question, because we don’t have any scientific consensus around what human intelligence is, and we really don’t have consensus around what it would mean if we actually simulate it in digital technologies; 75 percent of scientists who study AI would say current models are probably not going to get us there. But if you were to define the singularity as a fundamental transformation of the way that we work and live, I think that’s already happened.

Are you surprised at how quickly AI has grown?

In early 2020, I was the first journalist to profile OpenAI. At that time, the tech industry did not take them seriously, because they were just going to take existing AI technologies and use larger supercomputers to train their models. And people thought this was an intellectually lazy approach. But in the end, they were able to do it far faster than anyone could have imagined.

And it began as an altruistic organization?