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by Frank Bergman,
A world-renowned reporter is sounding the alarm after embedding herself in the upper echelons of the artificial intelligence industry and discovering that Silicon Valley elites are desperately scrambling to develop a digital “God.”
Karen Hao, a former reporter for MIT Technology Review, is raising red flags about the artificial intelligence industry after spending years investigating the inner workings of OpenAI and speaking with hundreds of insiders.
She is now warning that some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures are engaged in what she describes as an ideological quest to create a “machine god.”
Hao says her extensive investigation into OpenAI revealed a secretive culture driven by an obsession with developing artificial general intelligence (AGI).
AGI is a form of AI that proponents believe could eventually surpass human intelligence itself.
The findings form the basis of Hao’s new book, “Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination,” which argues that the race to build superintelligent machines has transformed from a supposedly altruistic mission into a high-stakes pursuit of power, influence, and unprecedented wealth.
Inside the Secretive World of OpenAI
Hao was granted extraordinary access to OpenAI’s headquarters in 2019, shortly after the company secured a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.
At the time, OpenAI publicly portrayed itself as a transparent nonprofit dedicated to ensuring advanced AI would benefit humanity.
But Hao says she quickly discovered a very different reality.
“Right off the bat, I started realising that something was not right,” Hao said.
Despite OpenAI’s public commitment to openness, Hao described an environment characterized by secrecy, restrictions, and internal paranoia.
Employees were warned not to speak with her outside approved channels, while security personnel were reportedly given photographs of her and instructed to monitor her movements.
“As I was talking to researchers, I noticed that they kept being very nervous about saying things they weren’t supposed to, which was bizarre, because the entire premise of OpenAI was they were going to share everything,” Hao said.
According to Hao, the atmosphere inside the company was “competitive, secretive, and insular.”
‘The Ideological Pursuit of the Machine God’
As her investigation expanded, Hao interviewed hundreds of former employees and individuals connected to OpenAI’s leadership circle.
Those conversations led her to conclude that many of the company’s top figures viewed the pursuit of artificial superintelligence with a near-religious intensity.
She describes the phenomenon as “the ideological pursuit of the machine god.”
Several former employees recounted stories that Hao says reflected the culture surrounding AGI development.
Among them was an executive retreat in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, where senior OpenAI figures allegedly gathered around a fire while former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever burned an effigy representing AGI.
Former employees told Hao that only after leaving OpenAI did they feel they had “come back down to Earth.”
The investigation also uncovered what Hao described as extreme secrecy surrounding company research.
According to her reporting, Sutskever once speculated about how to protect sensitive technology if someone attempted to sever his hand and use it to bypass a palm scanner protecting company systems.
Hao also reported that former OpenAI executive Dario Amodei drafted sensitive strategy documents on computers disconnected from the internet and distributed them only as physical printouts.
Race for Superintelligence Reshapes Entire Industry
According to Hao, OpenAI’s transformation accelerated as company leaders became increasingly convinced that achieving AGI first was the most important objective.
That pursuit drove OpenAI toward a strategy centered on massively scaling large language models by feeding them unprecedented quantities of data and computing power.
The approach required enormous financial resources, ultimately leading OpenAI to establish a for-profit arm and seek outside investment.
“It’s hard to overstate how much this idea of scale was considered a scientific extreme at the time,” Hao said.
She argues that OpenAI’s success triggered an industry-wide arms race as competitors rushed to build increasingly powerful AI systems using the same strategy.
“We’ve 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,” Hao argued.
“All of the things that we see in terms of the negative impacts of AI come from this scaling idea.”
Warnings Over Privacy, Energy Use, and Data Collection
Hao contends that many of the concerns now surrounding artificial intelligence stem directly from the industry’s relentless pursuit of larger models.
She points to sprawling data centers consuming vast quantities of electricity and water, growing pressure on local power grids, and extensive data collection practices that scrape information from across the internet.
According to Hao, OpenAI initially relied on carefully curated sources such as academic research papers, but eventually exhausted those supplies.
Companies then began harvesting massive quantities of online content from forums, social media platforms, and other public sources to continue expanding AI training datasets.
The result, she argues, has been increasingly powerful systems that often produce inaccurate information, half-truths, and unreliable outputs while raising serious questions about privacy and intellectual property rights.
A Different Path for Artificial Intelligence
Despite her criticism, Hao insists she is not opposed to artificial intelligence itself.
Rather than halting AI development, she argues that researchers should pursue more targeted and narrowly focused applications that solve specific problems without requiring enormous quantities of data and computing resources.
“We could still rapidly advance AI, just in a different direction,” Hao said.
She points to areas such as drug discovery, where carefully designed AI systems trained on specialized datasets could deliver significant breakthroughs without pursuing the far more ambitious goal of creating intelligence that surpasses humanity.
For Hao, the central question remains the same one she says she posed to OpenAI executives during her first visit in 2019: Why should humanity seek to create superintelligent machines in the first place?
Seven years later, she says she is still waiting for a convincing answer.
Source: https://slaynews.com
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The already have, the Metatron AI Omega, who run their dirty old game,
A Super Resource only adds up to a quick summary: Humans are a waste and there is no need for humans.
Think next of what shall happen in the next 3 nano seconds of fate. Let the genie out of the bottle and there will be no bottle. If anything is true of the off world group Orion and or Chimera Groups. Are such named darkened AI forces only to conquer and control under an already apparent AI god.. and or could one call it lurker the demi-urge the devil the opposite to Source. There is only one Source. least for those to believe and or not too. All the matter of one brain cell decision kept held in a personal option to retain and well rest is up to such. (yet even a deeper by product to thought. Could that entity already be resourced and connected to "A part of earth systems yet or already". and no one knows would think to that GFL and or other light entities Do! )
Back to this threat such was the point by building already super computer data centers without any controls, with the big BUT, lust for extreme control and well useless money. But this is a planet of un-full-filled-GREED such creates craters of self induced faults. Just consider the lottery super computers. Let the cash_pot go when X-level of income is achieved. Think it is any of guess. ha!
One might simply consider the next days become will certainly be quite enriched in feature reveal to actions played. Have the GFL await their position to act might carry challenge. But this has been done how many time before by more superior class of logic etc etc. This is simply a play book replay with what gain and what loss. Varies only by a schmick of nothing have one class define to what is a schmick. Yet everything is already decided.
Just the passing thought.