Over the past few years, I have read dozens of books, papers, and long-form investigations on the rise of artificial intelligence.

And while I enjoyed many of those books, and learned a lot, there is only 1 book I can say truly had a life-changing impact on me:

Empire of AI Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI by Karen Hao.

Some of my biggest takeaways:

• AI’s growth runs on invisible labour.
  Behind every polished model sits a global workforce performing low-paid, psychologically heavy tasks. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

• Scale is not neutral.
  Data centres, compute clusters, and massive model training runs have real environmental and social costs. The “bigger is better” mindset comes with a bill someone else pays.

• OpenAI’s evolution mirrors a broader industry shift.
  What began as a nonprofit mission to benefit humanity eventually bent toward speed, competition, and consolidation of power. Hao shows how this shift happens step by step.

• The 2023 leadership crisis was a symptom, not an accident.
  The board drama was not gossip. It revealed how fragile governance becomes when technology outpaces the structures meant to control it.

• None of this is inevitable.
  Hao argues that AI does not need to be built as an empire. Smaller, community-driven, transparent approaches exist, and the future is still up for negotiation.

(Of course, the book goes into detail on all of this. But these are my high-level takeaways.)

So, if you are at all interested in AI, power, and ethics, I highly suggest keeping a copy of Empire of AI Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI on your desk.