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.
She was reportedly escorted throughout the building, barred from certain areas, and prohibited from attending key meetings.
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.
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