Journalist Karen Hao began covering OpenAI in 2019. OpenAI was one of the early companies trying to build AI.
Hao, a graduate of MIT and a reporter for their Technology Review at the time, understood the science and was impressed by OpenAI’s original mission as a non-profit. The company would operate for the good of humanity. It would focus on safety and benevolence.
Hao saw things change. With success and with competition, the company increasingly wanted more. More energy, land, water, mineral resources, computational resources, money, talent, cheap overseas labor, and more data. More political influence. More computer chips. The non-profit phase ended and sometimes it seemed that the ever-present public enthusiasm was as much an attempt to dazzle, to avoid scrutiny, as it was genuine.
And overall, in the race with other companies, it never seemed clear to anyone, to any company, what the end goal was to be. What was AI supposed to do?