Book Bits: 24 May 2025

● Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI
Karen Hao
Interview with author via the Global and Mail
In her new book, Empire of AI: The Dreams and Nightmares of Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Hao follows the rise of OpenAI. She tracks how the company transformed from a non-profit that positioned itself as an idealistic underdog into the world’s largest AI company worth US$300-billion.
Alongside the fly-on-the-wall observations of OpenAI’s work culture, built from hundreds of interviews with employees, e-mails and Slack conversations, Hao pulls back the curtain on the departure of early investor Elon Musk, the reinstatement of charismatic Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman and reports from Colombia and Kenya, where she interviews low-wage contract workers who were tasked with categorizing the severity of graphic content used to train ChatGPT.

● The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future
Keach Hagey
Review via Publishers Weekly
Wall Street Journal reporter Hagey (The King of Content) portrays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as the ultimate comeback kid in this fleet-footed biography. The future billionaire landed his first major deal as an undergraduate at Stanford University, scaling up his location-based social network Loopt with an investment from venture capital firm Y Combinator in the mid 2000s. Altman narrowly avoided getting ousted from Loopt over allegations he helped former colleagues illegally reverse-engineer a competitor’s code in 2009, and landed at Y Combinator after Loopt was “sold for parts” in 2012. Hagey’s crackerjack reporting fleshes out Altman’s ascendance to Silicon Valley royalty, detailing how he outmaneuvered Elon Musk’s attempted takeover of OpenAI in the late 2010s by persuading board members that Musk would be too difficult to work with, and how a staff mutiny convinced the board to overturn their firing of Altman in 2023.

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