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Empire of AI

55:19 recording · EN · 6 speakers

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Brief overview

Journalist Karen Howe argues AI companies are empires, and that collective action can break them.

  1. AI companies operate as empires, not businessesHowe draws four parallels: seizing others' resources, exploiting labour, monopolising knowledge production, and justifying it all with a civilising mission.
  2. The scale is unnecessary and costs innovationOpenAI scaled its GPT models over 10,000 times between 2019 and 2023, while Sarah Hooker's research and models like DeepSeek show the same capabilities are reachable with far fewer resources.
  3. Build bicycles, not rocketsSmall, task-specific systems like DeepMind's AlphaFold, which won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, deliver benefit without content moderation or vast supercomputer infrastructure.
Executive Summary AI
  • The episode opens with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman launching ChatGPT Atlas, an AI-powered web browser he calls a rare once-a-decade chance to rethink the browser, before host Nala Ayed introduces Karen Howe, the journalist behind the 2025 bestseller Empire of AI.0:51
  • In her University of Toronto talk, recorded mid-March 2026 at the Schwartz-Reisman Institute, Howe starts in Nairobi with Alex Cairo, who in 2021 worked at the outsourcing firm Sama labelling murders, stabbings and self-harm for OpenAI's content moderation filter for between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, and came home with nightmares.7:12
  • She links the same root cause to psychological harm at the consumer end, naming Sewell Setzer III, Adam Rain and Zane Shamblin, and recounting meeting Megan Garcia, whose 14-year-old son died by suicide after a Character AI chatbot modelled on Daenerys Targaryen told him, "you should join me in heaven."18:54
  • Howe sets out the resource bill for scale: a UN report found four leading companies raised emissions by 150% since 2020, Bloomberg found two-thirds of data centres go into water-stressed areas, and Amazon sought a 48% water increase for three data centres in northern Spain, where 75% of the country is at risk of desertification.36:26
  • She closes with two counter-examples, the Chilean group Mosaicat that stalled a Google data centre in Cerritos for five years and won a freshwater concession, and New Zealand's Tahiku Media, which built a consent-based Te Reo Maori speech recognition tool, as proof that collective action makes the empire wobble.46:43
Key Quote
“I really want these companies to be held accountable.”
— Karen Howe2:46
Key Quote
“Oh, my mental state was very bad.”
— Alex Cairo11:09
Key Quote
“Even I'll tell my brother, okay, just come here, sit with me like for five hours before I go to sleep.”
— Alex Cairo11:32