Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI is a book by Karen Hao released on May 20, 2025. It focuses on the history of OpenAI and its culture of secrecy and devotion to the promise of artificial general intelligence (AGI). The book includes interviews with around 260 people, correspondence, and relevant documents. The title makes reference to colonial empires of the 1800s.

Hao visited OpenAI’s offices and covered the company for the MIT Technology Review two years before ChatGPT was released. Her experience there and reporting on topics of AI for seven years led her to write Empire Of AI. (Wikipedia)

Given how much time I spent “conversing” with —and gushing about— OpenAI’s famous chat bot (ChatGPT) this seemed like a book I should read. About half way through and not sure how much of the book I will share here.

“The Retro Biosciences bet reflected Altman’s fixation on longevity. He was an avid follower of “young blood” research-a line of scientific inquiry that studied how to reverse aging with transfusions of healthier, younger blood. Notably, it was an area in which Thiel was also interested, spawning a plethora of articles and memes about his desire to inject himself with the blood of teenagers. While at YC, Altman had also signed up with a $10,000 deposit to be on the wait list of a controversial startup called Nectome, which had been in one of the accelerator’s batches. Ripped straight out of science fiction, Nectome was pitching a service that would cryogenically freeze customers’ brains to one day […] upload to a computer.”