Wanna dish some gossip? Then this book by Karen Hao is for you. It’s an excellent read, though it clearly has an agenda and strays from impartiality at times.

That’s not meant as a knock. Hao gives a deeper look into OpenAI’s inner workings than any other book I’ve read. She has serious domain knowledge and sharp journalistic skills, honed over years reporting for the WSJ and other top outlets.

The book made a splash because Hao was the first to piece together an accurate timeline of the attempted ouster of Sam Altman from OpenAI. That was a wild ride.

She also covers the effective altruism (EA) angle well. I’ll write more about this in another post—the more I learn about EA and its cousin “effective accelerationism,” the more uneasy I am about the world we’re building. And yes, I’m a technologist helping build it.

This book is opinionated. Hao is not a fan of Altman. Period. She even devotes arguably too much time to Sam Altman’s sister. Those chapters felt murky, with as much he-said/she-said as journalism.

Hao also dives into the “digital colonization” of the Global South. It’s one of the few AI books to give this real coverage, and it’s illuminating. But the facts and figures aren’t always as well-sourced as I’d like, and they do carry a whiff of agenda-driven reporting.

Bottom line: I recommend this book, but know it’s not fully impartial. For a more balanced take, start with Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World by Parmy Olson.