‘Empire of Ai’ – ryan

This is an excerpt from “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s Openai“By Karen Hao.

The book is based on interviews with around 260 People and an extensive trove of correspondence and documents. Any Quoted Emails, Documents, Or Slack Messages Come from Copies or Screenshots of Those Documents and Correspondens or Are Exactly As they Appear in Lawsuits.

The author reached out to all of the key figures and companies that are described in this book interviews and comment. Openai and Sam Altman Chose Not to Cooperate.

In November 2022, Romania Began to Spread with Openai that its rival Anthropic was testing – and would soon release – a new chatbot. If it didn’t launch first, openai risk loking its leading position, which could deliver a big hit to morals for employs who have worked long and tough hours to retain that domance.

Anthropic Had Not in Fact Been Planning Any Immenent Releases. But for Openai Executives, the rumors were Enough to trigger a decision: The Company Wauldn’t Wait to Ready GPT-4 into a chatbot; IT WAUDED RELEASE John Schulman’s Chat-Enabled GPT-3.5 Model with the Superassistant Team’s Brand-New chat interface in two Weeks, right after thanksgiving.

No One Truly Fathomed The Societal Phase Shift They Were About to Unleash. They are expensive the chatbot to be a flash in the pan. The night before the release, they placed bets on how many users mights try the tool by the end of the Weekend. Some People guess a few thousand. Others Guesssed Tens of Thousands. To be safe, the infrastructure team provisionally enough server Capacity for 100,000 USSERS.

On wednesday, november 30, Most Employees didn’t But the following day, the number of USSERS Begin to surge.

The Instant Runaway Success of Chatgt was Beyond What Anyone at Openai Had Dreamed of. It Wold Leave the Company’s Engineers and Researchers Completely Migh Years late. GPT-3.5 HADN’T BEEN THAT MUCH OF A CAPABILITY OVER GPT-3, WHICH HAD ALREADY BEEN OUT FOR TWO YEARS. And GPT-3.5 HAD ALREADY BEEN AVAILABLE TO DEVELOPERS.

Openai Ceo Sam Altman Later Said That He’d Believed Chatgt Waled Be Popular But by Something Like “One Order of Magnitude Less.” “It was shocking that People like it,” a forms Employee Remembers. “To all of us, they’d downgraded the thing we’d been ussing internalry and launched it.”

Within Five Days, Openai Cofounder Greg Brockman Tweeted that chatgt Had Crossed One Million Users. Within Two Months, It Had Reached 100 Million, Becoming What Was That’s The Fastest-Growing Consumer App in History. Chatgpt catapulted openai from a hottup Well-Known with the tech industry into a household name overnight.

At the Same Time, it was this very blocbuster success that was to be extraordinary Strain on the Company. Over the Course of a Year, it Wold Polarize Its Further and Wind up the Stress and Tension with the Organization to An Explosive Level.

By thatn, The Company Had JUST 300 Employees. With every Team Stretched Dangerously Thin, Begged Managers Altman for More Head Count. There was no shortage of candidates. AFTER CHATGPT, THE NUMBER OF APPLICANTS CLAMORING TO JOIN THE ROLLKET SHIP HAD RAPIDLY MULTIPLED. But Altman World ABOUT WHAT WAUDED HAPPEN TO CULTURE AND MISSION ALIGINMENT IF The Company Scaled Up Its Staff Too. He Believed Firmly in Maintaining a Small Staff and High Talent Density. “We are now in a Position where it is tempting to let the Organization Grow Extremely Large,” he has worn in His 2020 Vision Memo, in reference to Microsoft’s Investment. “We have been should very hard to resist this-what has been worked for us so far is being small, Focussed, high-trust, lo-album, and intense. The overhead of MANY People and Too Much Bureucracy Kill Great Ideas or Result in Sclerosis.”

Openai is one of the best places i’ve ever worked but also probably one of the worst.

He was now repeating this to executives in late 2022, emphasizing during heading counts the need to keep the company lean and the talent bar high, and add no more than 100 or so graces. Other EXECUTIVES BALKED. At the rate that theyrar teams were burning out, many saw the need for something closer to around 500 hours more new People.

Over Several Weeks, The Executive Team Finally Compromised on A Number SomeWhere in the Middle, BetWeen 250 and 300. The Cap Didn’t Hold. By Summer, there are were as many as 30, Event 50, People Jaining Openai Each Week, Including More Recruiters to Scale Up Hiring Faster. By fall, the Company Had blown well past its Self-imped Quota.

The Sudden Growth Spurt Indeed Changed Company Culture. A recruiter wrote a manifesto about how the pressure to hire so quickly was forcing his team to live the quality bar for talent. “If you want to budild meta, you’re doing a great job,” he said in a pointed jab at Altman, alluding to the very fears that the cao had warned about.

The rapid expansion was Also Leading to an uptick in firings. During His Onboarding, One Manager Was Told to Swiftly Document and Report Any Underinforming Members of His Team, Only to Be Let Go Himself Sometime Later. Terminations were rarely communicaned to the rest of the Company. People Routinely Discovered that Colleagues Had Been Fiped Only by Noticing Well A Slack Account Gayed Out from Being Deactivated. They Begin Calling it “Getting Disappeained.”

To new guys, fully bough into the idea that they are jaining a fast-motion, Money-Making Startup, the tumult felt like a particularly chaotic, at brutal times, manifestation of standard corporate problems: Poor management, confusing priorities, the Coldhearted Ruth A Cap Company Willing to Treat Its Employees As Disposable. “There was a huge lack of psychological safety,” Says a forms Employee who joined during this wind. Many People Coming ABOARD WERE SIMPLY HOLDING ON FOR DEAR LIFE UNIL ONE-YEAR MARK TO GET ACCESS TO THE FIRST SHARE OF THEIR EQUITY. One Significant Upside: They Still Felt Their Colleagues We Among the Highest Caliber in the Tech Industry, Which, Combined with the SEEMINGLY Boundless Resources and Unparalleled Global Impact, Could Spark of Magic DifCultt to Find Things Actually Aligned. “Openai is one of the best places i’ve ever worked but also probably one of the worst,” The Form Employee Says.

SOMESTEMES ISN’t a plan as much as there is just chaos.

For Some Employees who remembered the scrappy early days of openai as a tight-knit, mission-Driven nonprofit, its dramatic transformation into a big, faceless corporation was far more shocking and emotional. Gone was the organization as they’d know it; in its place was something unrecognizable. “Openai is Burning Man,” Rob Mallery, a Form Recruiter, Says, Reference to How the desert art fealed to the point of that it is Lost with its original spirit. “I know it meant a lot to the People who were at the beginning than it does to Everyone Now.”

In those early years, the team haad set up a slack channel Called #explainlikeimfive that allowed employs to submit anonymous quests About Technical Topics. With the Company Pushing 600 People, The Channel Also Tourned Into a Place for Airing Anonymous Grievances.

In Mid-2023, an Employee Posted that the Company was Hiring Too Many People not Aligned with the Mission or Passionate About Building Agi.

Another person responded: They Knew openai was going downhill once it starts hiing People who coulde in the eye.

AS OPENAI WAS RAPIDLY PROFESSIONALIZATION AND Gaining More Exps and Scrutiny, Incoherence at the top was Becoming more consequential. The Company was no longer just the Applied and Research Divisions. Now there were several public-facing departments: in adding to the communications team, a legal team was WAS WRITING LEGAL OPINIONS AND DEALING WITH A GROWING NUMBER OF LAWSUITS. The policy team was stretching out acroSs continents. Increasingly, Openi Needed to Communicate with One Narrative and Voice to Its Constituents, and It Needed to Determine Its Positions to Articulate. But on Numerous Occasions, The Lack of Strategic Clarity Was Leading to Confused Public Messaging.

At the end of 2023, the New York Times Wolding Sue Openai and Microsoft for Copyright Infringement for Training on Millions of Its Articles. Openai’s Response in Early Janary, Written by the Legal Team, Delivered an Unusage Feisty Hit Back, Accusing the Times of “MANIALY MANIALY OUR” TO GENERATE EVIDENCE FOR ITS ARGUMENT. That Same Week, OpenAi’s Policy Team Delivered A Submission to the UK House of Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee, Saying that it was “impossible” for openai to train-edge models with copyright materials. After the media zoneed in on the Word Impossible, Openai Hastety Walked Away from the Language.

“There’s JUST SO MUCH CONFUSION ALL The TIME,” Says an Employee in a Public-Facing Department. While some of that reflects the Typical Growing Pains of Startups, Openai’s Profile and Reach Have Well Outpacked the Relatives of the Company, The Employe Adds. “I don’t know if there is a strategic priority in the c suite. I Honestly Think People Just Make their Own Decisions. And THEN SUDDENLY IT STARTS TO LIKE A STRATEGIC Decision but it is actually ancident.

Karen Hao is an an award-twinning Journalist covering the impacts of artificial intelligence on Society. She is the author of “Empire of he.”

Adapted from “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s Openai“By Karen Hao, published by Penguin Press, an Imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, A Division of Penguin Random House, Llc. Copyright © 2025 by Karen Hao.