A few weeks ago Bill Maher (Real Time) interviewed Erin Brokovich. Portrayed in the movie by Julia Roberts, if you recall, Erin successfully won a lawsuit against a company who was contaminating water. Erin continues to be an environmental activist and media influencer. Her conversation with Maher was about regulating “AI data bases”. That’s when I turned to a book that had long been sitting on my night table. Empire of AI tells the story about a technology that will “fundamentally reshape the world “and us. I wanted to know more about AI and key figures like Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI and why he claims AI’s importance “ is on par with the making of the atom bomb.“

Often compared to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and at times even to Taylor Swift, Sam Altman is the founder of Open AI, a tech company that’s barreling at warp speed toward something “vague”—AGI, artificial general intelligence. AGI is a “fine-tuned” technology that would equal or surpass human intelligence.

Born in 1985 Altman has two brothers and one sister Annie (who incidentally has alleged Altman had physically sexually abused her as a child). He calls himself a “crazy nerd. “At 17 he came out as gay, dropped out of Stanford to create Loopt a mapping company “enabling its users share locations” on their “devices”. Altman sold Loopt for $43 million, partnered with Paul Graham, founder of accelerator “Y Combinator” another AI company. YC provides seed money ($500,000) for “early stage startups”. YC teaches innovators to market the ideas and get rich. In 2014 Altman became president of YC. He got very rich.

So why all the angst about AI? AI’s positive promises are staggering. And who doesn’t love Chat GPT --- another Altman brainchild. Empire of AI goes inside an industry that explains the benefits of AI and the fears associated with a race toward something far more sinister--- AGI a technology that will determine the future and possibly the extinction of humans. The book also informs the reason Elon Musk is not too happy with either Google or Open AI.

Briefly the focus is not whether AI (currently available) has staggering benefits for humanity. It does. Detractors can argue it will take jobs away or provide misinformation or exploit labor in some countries (Kenya, Venezuela for example) for the good of a few elites controlling the “Empire”. Certainly AI requires an unfathomable quantity of resources, electricity, water, “compute” (materials like “chips, etc” to make supercomputers run). Recently some warn “the entire earth will be covered with data centers to power AI”. Yet AI can provide “equitable education” economic benefits, mitigate climate change, create significant medical innovation. The debate is certainly on the side of AI. But not so much on the mission of AGI –technology that could match or exceed human intelligence. Is this the next stage evolution? The race is on. Who will govern the machine-generated robots. Will it be the ‘bots’ themselves poised to eliminate us all? Will escaping to Mars (as Elon Musk plans) be possible?

What does Altman say about AGI? Here are some quotes: “I think there is a race somewhere but people don’t agree on where to”. And “ I don’t have a finish line in mind---maybe it’s great, maybe it’s bad like a group of scientists who look at their creation and say “what have we done?” Or “Nobody knows what AGI would look like”. Pinned on Altman’s office wall, is the following: Building AGI is the most important project in the world--- if we don’t do it somebody will. Empire of AI proves one thing. There is not greater need for global cooperation than right now.