Review:
Hao looks at OpenAI, Anthropic, Sam Altman, and other people involved in AI development and research. She examines the promises, realities, and impacts of generative AI.
Not a lot of detail there, I know, but I listened to this in audiobook form, finished it a while back, and didn't really take notes. Although I had a print copy of this available to me, it seemed too dauntingly thick every time I thought about starting it. Audio was probably the best way for me to go, and, even then, I almost DNFed this several times because the picture Hao painted was so depressing.
I'm so tired of tech bros. In this book, it really struck me how focused so many of the movers and shakers in the world of AI, like Sam Altman, were on the world- and humanity-ending possibilities of AI, so convinced that only their vision could save us all, and so blind to the real-life, "happening right now" harms of AI. In some cases, maybe it wasn't necessarily that they were blind to those harms, but that they didn't think they truly mattered unless more of the world was being harmed than not. Either way, it made my skin crawl.
Hao believably explained why the AI future Sam Altman and others believe is inevitable actually isn't, but is being made to seem inevitable by a few charismatic and persuasive people. This book was very long, often depressing, and I had trouble keeping track of all the names. It did at least give me a different way of thinking about and framing current news about AI (and helped explain why the people who keep screaming about how AI will lead to humanity's doom seem to be the very same people doing their best to build AI up as much as possible).
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