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| MOCA Talks
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| With Karen Hao (Author, Empire Of AI). |
| Museum of Chinese in America, 215 Centre St |
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Oct 11 (Sat) , 2025 @ 03:00 PM
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$32 |
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/-73.99905396,40.71937943,13,0,0/550x200?access_token=pk.eyJ1IjoiZ2FyeXNndWlkZSIsImEiOiJjamtobmRiYmgwb3gwM3F1a2o2Mmd0YWw3In0.DinA62CR3-OKtf3axa5O7Q)
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| DETAILS |
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Join us to explore what responsible AI might look like & what's at stake for communities around the world.
The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) cordially invites you to a timely conversation with award-winning journalist & author Karen Hao on the promises & perils of today's AI revolution. Drawing on years of reporting & her bestselling book Empire of AI, Hao traces OpenAI's rapid rise from its origins as a safety-minded nonprofit to a market-driving powerhouse backed by Microsoft & examines how the global race to build ever-larger AI systems is reshaping economies, labor, & the environment.
Hao will offer an insider's view of the leadership crises & strategic pivots that have shaped OpenAI's culture, illustrating how power, ambition, & idealism collide inside one of the most influential organizations of our era. Join us to explore what responsible AI might look like & what's at stake for communities around the world.
About Karen Hao
Karen Hao is a bestselling author & award-winning reporter covering the impacts of artificial intelligence on society. She was the first journalist to profile OpenAI & wrote a book, Empire of AI, about the company & its global implications, which became an instant New York Times bestseller. She writes for publications including The Atlantic & leads the Pulitzer Center's AI Spotlight Series, a program training journalists around the world on how to cover AI. She was formerly a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, covering American & Chinese tech companies, & a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. Her work is regularly taught in universities & cited by governments. She has received numerous accolades for her coverage, including an American Humanist Media Award & an American National Magazine Award for Journalists Under 30. She received her Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from MIT.
About Empire of AI
When AI expert & investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, & potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the compute power of high-end chips & the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans cleaning up that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, & a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy & water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new & ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?
Spoiler alert: it didn't. Armed with Microsoft's billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history-toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company & the industry, & so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry-Altman's sudden firing & triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn't just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too-as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they're the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, & Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI & its impact we've seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy & down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.
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