OpenAI: The power and the pride

There is no question that OpenAI pulled off something historic with its release of ChatGPT 3.5 in 2022. It set in motion an AI arms race that has already changed the world in a number of ways and seems poised to have an even greater long-term effect than the short-term disruptions to things like education and employment that we are already beginning to see. How that turns out for humanity is something we are still reckoning with and may be for quite some time. But a pair of recent books both attempt to get their arms around it with accounts of what two leading technology journalists saw at the OpenAI revolution. In Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, Karen Hao tells the story of the company's rise to power and its far-reaching impact all over the world.