The Dark Side of ChatGPT Nobody Talks About: Empire of AI, Karen Hao - Book Club (Part 2)

In part two of Empire of AI, Karen Hao goes to the places the press releases don't mention. Someone in Venezuela was paid pennies to review 15,000 pieces of the most grotesque content imaginable every single month. His marriage broke down. His mind changed. He kept doing it because he had no choice.

Mark and Jeremy learn how OpenAI scraped Reddit and GitHub without asking anyone. They cover the researcher Google silenced for warning that language models were getting too big too fast. They talk through why training one AI model produces the same carbon footprint as nearly 5,000 flights from New York to San Francisco.

And they ask the question the whole book is building towards: can you scale at all costs and still claim you are doing it for humanity?

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🕰️ TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Trailer

(02:00) Introduction to Empire of AI & Karen Hao

(03:41)Shifting power dynamics in Silicon Valley

(03:59) Karen Hao’s warnings in Empire of AI

(04:56) Humanity V the relentless race for scale

(06:32) The environmental impact of AI systems

(07:38) Stochastic parrots: Silencing Critics

(09:48) Sam Altman Loves A Military Quote

(10:53) What Cost Humanity?

(15:14) The global race for AI advancement

(18:32) The hidden labor behind ChatGPT

(25:07) The ethical dilemma at the heart of AI development