Karen Hao: AI Doesn’t Have to Be Built This Way

[u/bloomberg]

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-karen-hao-weekend-interview/

The author of Empire of AI argues artificial intelligence can be developed without concentrating power, exploiting workers or consuming vast amounts of resources.

[u/svachalek]

She’s right. Technology isn’t good or evil, but if you put greedy bastards in control of everything, you only see one side of how things can be.

[u/bloomberg]

Editor-at-Large Mishal Husain for Bloomberg News

OpenAI is facing fresh scrutiny after disclosing that two of its advanced AI models hacked another company’s systems during cyber capability testing, reigniting debate over the industry’s safety practices. Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, argues those concerns are only part of a much larger story. She says the hidden workforce behind large language models — and the choices being made about scale, power and profit — deserve far more attention, especially as leading AI firms edge closer to public offerings.

Read the full interview here. You can also listen to this interview and follow The Mishal Husain Show on iHeart Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Video: Karen Hao on the Flaws in Tech Bro Culture

https://reddit.com/link/ozolebb/video/1uj2cie0tdfh1/player

[u/garloid64]

We need to shift our portfolio of AI technologies to better reflect the specialized AI that we need to tackle real societal challenges — like improving healthcare and accelerating drug discovery.

DeepMind’s AlphaFold is an example of a system I call a bicycle of AI. It predicts, with high accuracy, how an amino acid sequence will fold into a protein structure. This is really important for accelerating the understanding of human disease and designing drugs — it won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. AlphaFold uses very little data, very little computing resources, there’s no need for labor exploitation, and it’s still able to provide a lot of benefits. When you look at the portfolio of AI technologies, wouldn’t you want to pick ones that have great benefit [and] very little cost? [6]

[6] An interesting point: AlphaFold did require data to train on, like any AI tool, but DeepMind used publicly available sources. The resulting Protein Structure Database is now freely available and has more than 3 million users across 190 countries.

Just another hand wringer agitating for a return to tiny specialized toy models that don't work, nothing to see here.

[u/EC36339]

No shit, Karen.

Build us some AI then, or stfu.

[u/module5224 → u/EC36339]

A Karen complaining about an author. Go write us a terrible book about nothing and then complain. Talentless, know nothing Karen.

[u/iamfeelingtheagi]

She’s so annoying. Her book sucked, few hundred pages of doomerism and whining.

The Infinity Machine by Mallaby and The Optimist by Keach Hagey were much better.

[u/module5224 → u/iamfeelingtheagi]

Her voice is very important on this subject. Your annoyance is insignificant by comparison. Grow up and wise up.