Reading a positive review led to me ordering a copy from my local bookshop; after all, who wouldn’t want to read about the infighting, backstabbing, and politics within the companies creating our dystopian future?
Journalist Karen Hao has leveraged her impressive contacts to pull together the story of Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT. The style reminds me a little of Character Limit, with sordid corporate tales full of ego-laden tech bros.
But that story is interspersed with the perspectives of those who contribute to AI in less glamorous ways; tagging the huge data sets that are used to train these collosal LLMs. Often working on very dark data sets (child abuse imagery, racist texts, etc.) and always for pitiful and precarious pay, these elements of the book echoed those in Code Dependent.
Not quite as galloping a read as the Twitter takeover backstory, it is nonetheless eye opening and makes for an uncomfortable impression of the reckless people building potentially dangerous technologies.
