American journalist Karen Hao talks to Samantha Subramanian at the 14th Bangalore Literature Festival on Sunday. | Photo credit: ALLEN EGENUSE J.
Karen Hao describes a company like OpenAI as “the contemporary British East India Company”. “The parallels are extremely stark,” said the award-winning reporter, who was interviewed by journalist Samantha Subramanian at the Bangalore Literature Festival on Sunday.
Like the East India Company, they “claim resources that are not their own” and “use extraordinary amounts of labor,” said Ms. Hao, author of Empire of AI.
In a riveting session, Mr. Subramanian and Ms. Hao, the first journalist to extensively profile OpenAI, delved into various aspects of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
She said it’s really hard to explain to people that OpenAI wasn’t considered a serious company before. “It was considered a strange stepchild in the AI world because they said ‘we’re going to pursue artificial general intelligence,’ which was largely unpopular as a concept in the scientific community because it was seen as an almost pseudoscientific idea,” said Ms. Hao, then a technology reporter at MIT Technology Review.
At the time, anyone who talked about AGI was considered “not a real researcher,” she said, adding that this was also true of many people who worked at OpenAI at the time, such as Greg Brockman, a tech entrepreneur who had never done AI research in his life, and Sam Altman, “a dropout from Stanford (who thought he was going to be a writer and realized he wasn’t good enough, M. Hao).
The session also saw a discussion of the mythology of AI and provided insight into how early private correspondence between the likes of Elon Musk, Mr Altman and Dario Amodei suggested they were less positive about the technology than they are today. “At the time, you could feel a real kind of fear that AGI or rogue AI could destroy humanity in some way,” Mr. Subramanian said, adding wryly, “Mr. Musk, of course, decided to do it himself.”
Another interesting thread that was discussed was the complex financial and political interests of many of the founders of AI companies and the overlap of those interests with those of the current US political dispensation.
“It’s hard not to notice that the data empire was built at a time when there has been a significant decline in human rights and free speech in the US in general,” Mr. Subramanian noted, a sentiment Ms. Bao agreed with. “Both Silicon Valley and Washington are in their imperial era,” she said.
Published – 07 Dec 2025 23:27 IST
