Loading summary
Transcript72 lines
- [00:13]
Amy Goodman
From New York, this is democracy now.
- [00:16]
James Earl Jones
What to the American slave is your fourth of July? I answer a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham.
- [00:41]
Amy Goodman
What to the slave is your 4th of July? We'll hear Frederick Douglass 1852 Independence Day address read by the late great James Earl Jones. Then to journalist Karen hall, author of the new book Empire of Dreams and Nightmares. In Sam Altman's OpenAI, every single community
- [01:06]
Karen Howe
that I spoke to, whether it was artists having their intellectual property taken or Chilean water activists having their fresh water taken, they all said that when they encountered the empire, they initially felt exactly the same way. A complete loss of agency to self determine their future. And that is when I realized the horizontal harm here is AI is threatening democracy. If the majority of the world is going to feel this loss of agency over self determining their future, democracy cannot
- [01:40]
Amy Goodman
survive all that and more coming up. This is democracynow. Democracynow.org, the war and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Today, in this special broadcast, we begin with the words of Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Frederick Douglass gave one of his most famous speeches, what to the slave is your fourth of July? He was addressing the Rochester Ladies Anti Slavery Society. The legendary actor James Earl Jones read the historic address during a performance of Voice of A People's History of the United States, based on Howard Zinn's iconic book. The late great historian introduced the address.
- [02:42]
James Earl Jones
Frederick Douglass, once a slave, became a brilliant and powerful leader of the anti slavery movement. In 1852, he was asked to speak in celebration of the Fourth of July. Fellow citizens, pardon me and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us? And am I therefore called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar and to confess their benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary. Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me, this Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems or inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? What to the American slave is your fourth of July? I answer a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham. Your boasted liberty and unholy license, your national greatness swelling vanity. Your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless. Your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence. Your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery. Your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy. A thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States. At this very hour, at a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh, had I the ability and could reach the nation's ear, I would today pour forth a stream, a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire. It is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened. The conscience of the nation must be roused. The propriety of the nation must be startled. The hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed. And the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
- [07:24]
Amy Goodman
James Earl Jones reading the words of Frederick Douglass. When we come back, Karen Howe, author of the new book Empire of AI Dreams and Nightmares and Sam Altman's OpenAI.
- [07:39]
Karen Howe
I submit my dream to you. People have the power. People have the power. People have the power. People have the power, the power to dream, to rule, to wrestle the world from fools. It's decreed the people rule. Well, it's decreed the people rule. Listen, I believe everything we dream can come to pass through our union. We can turn the world around. We can turn.
- [08:30]
Amy Goodman
This is democracy now. Democracynow.org, the war and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. We turn now to the Empire of AI that's the name of a new Book by the journalist Karen Howe, who's closely reported on the rise of the artificial intelligence industry with a focus on Sam Altman's OpenAI, that's the company behind ChatGPT. Karen Howe compares the actions of the AI industry to those of colonial powers in the past. She writes, quote, the empires of AI are not engaged in the same overt violence and brutality that mark this history, but they too seize and extract precious resources to feed their vision of artificial intelligence. The work of artists and writers, the data of countless individuals posting about their experiences and observations online, the land, energy and water required to house and run massive data centers and supercomputers, she writes. Karen Howe is a former reporter at the Wall Street Journal and MIT Technology Review, where she became the first journalist to profile OpenAI. Democracy Now. Juan Gonzalez and I spoke to her. I began by asking her to explain what artificial intelligence is.
- [09:48]
Karen Howe
So AI is a collection of many different technologies, but most people were introduced to it through ChatGPT. And what I argue in the book and what the title refers to, Empire of AI. It's actually a critique of the specific trajectory of AI development that led us to ChatGPT and has continued since ChatGPT, and that is specifically Silicon Valley's C scale at all costs approach to AI development. AI models in modern day, they are trained on data. They need computers to train them on that data. But what Silicon Valley did and what OpenAI did in the last few years is they started blowing up the amount of data and the size of the computers that need to do this training. So we are talking about the full English language Internet being fed into these models, books, scientific articles, all of the intellectual property that is being created and also massive super computers that run tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of computer chips that are the size of dozens, maybe hundreds of football fields and use practically the entire energy demands of cities now. So this is an extraordinary type of AI development that is causing a lot of social, labor and environmental harms. And that is ultimately why I evoke this analogy to Empire.
- [11:07]
James Earl Jones
And Karen, could you talk some more about not only the energy requirements, but the water requirements of these huge data centers that are essence, in essence, the backbone of, of this widening industry?
- [11:22]
Karen Howe
Absolutely. I'll give you two stats on both the energy and the water when talking about the energy demand. McKinsey recently came out with a report that said in the next five years, based on the current pace of AI computational infrastructure expansion, we would need to put as much energy on the global grid as what is consumed by two to six Times the energy consumed Ann by the state of California and that will mostly be serviced by fossil fuels. We're already seeing reporting of coal plants with their lives being extended. They were supposed to retire, but now they cannot. To support this data center development, we are seeing methane gas turbines, unlicensed ones, being popped up to service these data centers as well. From a fresh water perspective, these data centers need to be trained on fresh water. They cannot be trained on any other type of water because it can corrode the equipment, it can lead to bacterial growth, and most of the time it actually taps directly into a public drinking water supply because that is the infrastructure that has been laid to deliver this clean fresh water to different businesses, to different homes. And Bloomberg recently had an analysis where they looked at the expansion of these data centers around the world. And two thirds of them are being placed in water scarce areas. So they're being placed in communities that do not have access to fresh water. So it's not just the total amount of fresh water that we need to be concerned about, but actually the distribution of this infrastructure around the world.
- [13:01]
James Earl Jones
And most people are familiar with ChatGPT, the consumer aspect of AI, but what about the military aspect of AI, where in essence we're finding Silicon Valley companies becoming the next generation of defense contractors.
- [13:20]
Karen Howe
One of the reasons why OpenAI and many other companies are turning to the defense industry is because they have spent an extraordinary amount of money in developing these technologies. They're spending hundreds of billions to train these models and they need to recoup those costs. And there are only so many industries in so many places that have that size of a paycheck to pay. And so that's why seeing a cozying up to the defense industry, we're also seeing Silicon Valley use the US government in their empire building ambitions. You could argue that the US government is also trying to use Silicon Valley vice versa in their empire building ambitions. But certainly these technologies are not, they are not designed to be used in a sensitive military context. And so the aggressive push of these companies to try and get those defense contracts and integrate their technologies more and more into the infrastructure of the military is really alarming.
- [14:19]
Amy Goodman
I wanted to go to the countries you went to or the stories you covered. I mean, this is amazing. The depth of your reporting from Kenya to Uruguay to Chile, you were talking about the use of water. And I also want to ask you about nuclear power. But in Chile, what is happening there around these data centers and the water they would use and the resistance to that?
- [14:43]
Karen Howe
Yeah, so Chile has an interesting History in that it's been under. It was under a dictatorship for a very long time. And so during that time, most public resources were privatized, including water. But because of an anomaly, there's one community in the greater Santiago metropolitan region that actually still has access to a public freshwater resource that services both that community as well as the rest of the country in emergency situations. That is the exact community that Google chose to try to put a data center in. And they proposed for their data center to use 1000 times more fresh water than that community used annually, and it would be free. And, you know, I have no idea. That is a great question. But what the community told me was they weren't even paying taxes for this because they believed, based on reading the documentation, that the taxes that Google was paying was in fact to where they had registered their offices, their administrative offices, not where they were putting down the data center. So they were not seeing any benefit from this data center directly to that community. And they were seeing no checks placed on the fresh water that this data center would have been allowed to extract. And so these activists said, wait a minute, absolutely not. We're not going to allow this data center to come in unless they give us a legitimate reason for why it benefits us. And so they started doing boots on the ground activism, pushing back, knocking on every single one of their neighbor's doors, handing out flyers to the community, telling them, this company is taking our freshwater resources without giving us anything in return. And so they escalated so dramatically that it escalated to Google Chile, it escalated to Google Mountain View, which by the way, then sent representatives to Chile that only spoke English. But then it eventually escalated to the Chilean government. And the Chilean government now has roundtables where they ask these community residents and the company representatives and representatives from the government to come together to actually discuss how to make data center development more beneficial to the community. The activists say the fight is not over. Just because they've been invited to the table doesn't mean that everything is suddenly better. They need to stay vigilant. They need to continue scrutinizing these projects. But thus far, they've been able to block this project for four to five years and have gained that seat at the table.
- [17:10]
James Earl Jones
And how is it that these Western companies, in essence, are exploiting labor in the Global South? You go into something called data annotation firms. What are those?
- [17:24]
Karen Howe
Yeah, so because AI, modern day AI systems are trained on massive amounts of data, and they're scraped, that's scraped from the Internet, you can actually pump that data directly into your AI model, because there are a lot of things within that data. It's heavily polluted, it needs to be cleaned, it needs to be annotated. So this is where data annotation firms come in. These are middleman firms that hire contract labor to provide to these AI companies to do that kind of data preparation. And OpenAI, when it was starting to think about commercializing its products and thinking about, let's put text generation machines that can spew any kind of text into the hands of millions of users, they realized they needed to have some kind of content moderation. They needed to develop a filter that would wrap around these models and prevent these models from actually spewing racist, hateful and harmful speech to users that would not make a very good commercially viable product. And so they contracted these middleman firms in Kenya, where the Kenyan workers had to read through reams of the worst text on the Internet as well as AI generated text, where OpenAI was prompting its own AI models to imagine the worst text on the Internet and then telling these Kenyan workers to detail, to categorize them in detailed taxonomies of Is this sexual content? Is this violent content? How graphic is that violent content? In order to teach its filter all the different categories of content it had to block, and this is an incredibly uncommon form of labor, there are lots of other different types of contract labor that they use, but these workers, they're paid a few bucks an hour, if at all. And just like the era of social media, these content moderators are left very deeply, psychologically traumatized. And ultimately there is no real philosophy behind why these workers are paid a couple bucks an hour and have their lives destroyed. And why AI researchers who also contribute to these models are paid million dollar compensation packages simply because they sit in Silicon Valley in OpenAI's offices. That is the logic of Empire. And that harkens back to my title, Empire of AI.
- [19:41]
Amy Goodman
So let's go back to your title, Empire of AI. The subtitle Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. So tell us the story of Sam ALTMAN and what OpenAI is all about, right through to the deal he just made in the Gulf when President Trump, Sam Altman and Elon Musk were there.
- [20:02]
Karen Howe
Altman is very much a product of Silicon Valley. His career was first as a founder of a startup, and then as the president of Y Combinator, which is one of the most famous startup accelerators in Silicon Valley, and then the CEO of OpenAI. And there's no coincidence that OpenAI ended up introducing the world to the scale at all costs approach to AI development, because that is the way that Silicon Valley has operated in the entire time that Altman came up in it. And so he is a very strategic person. He is incredibly good at telling stories about the future and painting these sweeping visions that investors and employees want to be a part of. And so early on at YC he identified that AI would be one of the trends that could take off. And he was trying to build a portfolio of different investments and different initiatives to open place himself in the center of various different trends, depending on which one took off. He was investing in quantum computing, he was investing in nuclear fusion, he was investing in self driving cars. And he was developing a fundamental AI research lab. Ultimately the AI research lab was the ones that started accelerating really quickly. So he makes himself the CEO of that company. And originally he started it as a nonprofit to try and position it as a counter to for profit driven incentives in Silicon valley. But within one and a half years, OpenAI's executives identified that if they wanted to be the lead in this space, they had to go for this scale at all cost approach and had to should be in quotes. They thought that they had to do this. There are actually many other ways to develop AI and to have progress in AI that does not take this approach. But once they decided that they realized the bottleneck was capital. It just so happens Sam Altman is a once in a generation fundraising talent. He created this new structure nesting a for profit arm within the nonprofit to become this fundraising vehicle for the tens of billions and ultimately hundreds of billions that they needed to pursue the approach that they decided on. And that is how we ultimately get to present day OpenAI, which is one of the most capitalistic companies in the history of, of Silicon Valley, continuing to raise hundreds of billions and Altman has joked even trillions to produce a technology that ultimately has a middling economic impact thus far.
- [22:35]
Amy Goodman
We'll return to our conversation in a minute with Karen Howe, author of the new book Empire of AI Dreams and Nightmares, and Sam Altman's Open AI. Stay with us. This is democracy now, democracynow.org, the war and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. In this holiday special, we continue with the journalist Karen Howe, author of the new book Empire of Dreams and Nightmares and Sam Altman's OpenAI. She came into our studio in May. She talked about how AI will impact workers.
- [23:59]
Karen Howe
One of the things that we have seen is this technology is already having a huge impact on jobs. Not necessarily because the technology itself is really capable of replacing jobs. But it is perceived as capable enough that executives are laying off workers and we need more, some kind of more guardrails to actually prevent these companies from continuing to try and develop labor automating technologies and try to shift them to producing labor assistive technologies.
- [24:35]
Amy Goodman
What do you mean?
- [24:36]
Karen Howe
So OpenAI, their definition of what they call artificial general intelligence is highly autonomous systems that outperform humans in most economically valuable work. So they explicitly state that they are trying to automate jobs away. I mean, what is economically valuable work but the things that people do to get paid? But there's this really great book called Power in Progress by MIT economists Jerome Acemoglu and Simon Johnson who mention that technology development, all technology revolutions, they take a labor automating approach, not because of inevitability, but because the people at the top choose to automate those jobs away. They choose to design the technology so that they can sell it to executives and say, you can shrink your costs by laying off all these workers and using our AI services instead. But in the past we've seen studies that, for example, suggest that if you develop an AI tool that a doctor uses rather than replacing the doctor, you will actually get better health care for patients, you will get better cancer diagnoses. If you develop an AI tool that teachers can use rather than just an AI tutor that replaces the teacher, your kids will get better educational outcomes. And so that's what I mean by labor assistive than labor.
- [25:57]
Amy Goodman
And explain what you mean, because I think a lot of people don't even understand artificial intelligence. And when you say replace the a doctor, what are you talking about?
- [26:07]
Karen Howe
Right. So these companies, they try to develop a technology that they position as an everything machine that can do anything. And so they will try to say, you can use this, you can talk to ChatGPT for therapy. No, you cannot. ChatGPT is not a licensed therapist. And in fact, these models actually spew lots of medical misinformation. And there have been lots of examples of actually users being psychologically harmed by the model because the model will continue to reinforce self harming behaviors. And we've even had cases where children who speak to chatbots and develop huge emotional relationships with these chatbots have actually killed themselves after using these chatbot systems. But that's what I mean. When these companies are trying to develop labor automating tools, they're positioning it as, you can now hire this tool instead of hire a worker.
- [27:05]
Amy Goodman
So you've talked about Sam Altman, and in part one, we touched on who he is. But I'd like you to go more deeply into who Sam Altman is, how he exploded onto the US Scene, testifying before Congress, actually warning about the dangers of AI. So that really protected him in a way. People seeing him as a prophet. That's a P R O P H E t. But now we can talk about the other kind of prophet, P R O F I t and how OpenAI was formed. How is OpenAI different from AI?
- [27:42]
Karen Howe
OpenAI is a. I mean, it was originally founded as a nonprofit, as I mentioned, and Altman specifically, when he was thinking about how do I make a fundamental AI research lab that is going to make a big splash, he chose to make it a nonprofit because he identified that if he could not compete on capital, and he was relatively late to the game, Google already had a monopoly on a lot of top AI research talent at the time. If he could not compete on capital and he could not compete in terms of being a first mover, he needed some other kind of ingredient there to really recruit talent, recruit public goodwill, and establish a name for OpenAI. So he identified a mission. He identified, let me make this a nonprofit, and let me give it a really compelling mission. So the mission of OpenAI is to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. And one of the quotes that I open my book with is this quote that Sam Altman cited himself in 2013 in his blog. He was an avid blogger back in the day, talking about his learnings on business and strategy and Silicon Valley startup life. And the quote is, successful people build companies, more successful people build countries. The most successful people build religions. And then he reflects on that quote in his blog, saying, it appears to me that the best way to build a religion is actually to build a company.
- [29:16]
Amy Goodman
And so talk about how Altman was then forced out of the company and then came back. And also, I just found it so fascinating that you were able to speak with. With so many OpenAI workers, you thought there was a kind of total ban on you.
- [29:29]
James Earl Jones
Yes.
- [29:30]
Karen Howe
Yeah, exactly. So I was the first journalist to profile OpenAI. I embedded within the company for three days in 2019, and then my profile published in 2020 for MIT Technology Review. And at the time, I identified in the profile this tension that I was seeing, where it was a nonprofit by name, but behind the scenes, a lot of the public values that they espoused were actually the opposite of how they operated. So they espoused transparency, but they were highly secretive. They ESP Espoused collaborativeness, they were highly competitive, and they espoused that they had no commercial intent. But in fact, it seemed like they had just gotten a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. It seems like they were rapidly going to develop commercial intent. And so I wrote that into the profile and OpenAI was deeply unhappy about it and they would not refuse to talk to me for three years. And so when OpenAI took up this mission of artificial general intelligence, they were able to essentially shape and mold what they wanted this technology to be based on what is most convenient for them. But when they identified was at a time when scientists really looked down on this term, even AGI. And so they absorbed just a small group of self identified AGI believers. This is why I call it quasi religious, because there's no scientific evidence that we can actually develop AGI. The people who are strongly have this strong conviction that they will do it and that it's going to happen soon. It is just purely based on belief and they talk about it as a belief too. But there are two factions within this belief system of the AGI religion. There are people who think AGI is going to bring us to utopia, and there are people who think AGI is going to destroy all of humanity. Both of them believe that it is possible, it's coming soon. And therefore they conclude that they need to be the ones to control the technology and not democratize it. And this is ultimately what leads to your question of what happened when Sam Altman was fired and rehired. Through the history of OpenAI, there's been a lot of clashing between the boomers and doomers about who should actually.
- [31:35]
Amy Goodman
The boomers and doomers.
- [31:37]
Karen Howe
The boomers and the doomers, those that
- [31:40]
Amy Goodman
say it'll bring us the apocalypse, Utopia,
- [31:42]
Karen Howe
boomers, and those that say it'll destroy humanity, the doomers. And they have clashed relentlessly and aggressively about how quickly to build the technology, how quickly to release the technology.
- [31:55]
Amy Goodman
And I want to take this up until today to. In January, the Trump administration announcing the Stargate project, a $500 billion project to boost AI infrastructure in the United States. This is OpenAI's Sam Altman speaking alongside President Trump.
- [32:16]
Karen Howe
I think this will be the most important project of this era.
- [32:19]
James Earl Jones
And as Masa said, for AGI to
- [32:20]
Karen Howe
get built here to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, to create a new industry centered here, we wouldn't be able to do this without you, Mr. President.
- [32:28]
Amy Goodman
He also there referred to AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. Explain what happened here and what this is and has it actually happened.
- [32:40]
Karen Howe
So, so Altman, before Trump was elected, he already was sensing through observation that it was possible that the administration would shift and that he would need to start politicking quite heavily to ingratiate himself to a new administration. Altman is very strategic. He was under a lot of pressure at the time as well, because his original co founder, Elon Musk now has great beef with him. Musk feels like Altman used his name and his money to set up OpenAI and then he got nothing in return. So Musk had been suing him, still suing him, and suddenly became first buddy of the Trump administration. So Altman basically cleverly orchestrated this announcement where by the way, the announcement's quite strange because the Trump, President Trump is not. It's not the US government giving $500 billion. It's private investment coming into the US from places like SoftBank, which is. Which is one of the largest investment funds run by Masayoshi San, a Japanese businessman who made a lot of his wealth from the previous tech era. So it's not even the US government that's providing this money.
- [33:59]
Amy Goodman
And take that right through to now. That Gulf trip that Elon Musk was on, but so was Sam Altman. To the fury of Elon Musk. And then a deal was sealed in Abu Dhabi.
- [34:13]
Karen Howe
Yes.
- [34:14]
Amy Goodman
That didn't include Elon Musk, but was about OpenAI.
- [34:18]
Karen Howe
Exactly. So Altman has continued to try and use the US Government as a way to get access to more places and more powerful spaces to build out this empire. And one of the things, because OpenAI's computational infrastructure needs are so aggressive, I had an OpenAI employee tell me were running out of land and power. So they are running out of resources in the US which is why they're trying to get access to land and energy in other places. The Middle east has a lot of lands and has a lot of energy and they're willing to strike deals. And that is why Altman was part of that trip looking to strike a deal. And what they, the deal that they struck was to build a massive data center or multiple data centers in the Middle east using their land and their energy. But one of the things that OpenAI has recently rolled out, they call it the OpenAI for Countries program. And it is this idea that they want to install OpenAI hardware and software in places around the world and explicitly says we want to build democratic AI rails. We want to install our hardware and software as a foundation of democratic AI globally so that we can stop China from installing authoritarian AI globally. But the thing that he does not acknowledge is that there is nothing democratic about what he's doing. You know, the Atlantic executive editor says we need to call these companies for what they are. They are techno authoritarians. They do not ask the public for any perspective on how they develop the technology, what data they train the technology on, where they develop these data centers. In fact, these data centers are often developed in the COVID of night under shell companies like Meta recently entered New Mexico under the shell company named Greater Kudu llc.
- [36:25]
Amy Goodman
Greater Kudu.
- [36:26]
Karen Howe
Greater Kudu llc. And once the deal was actually closed and residents couldn't do anything about it anymore, that's when it was revealed. Surprise. We're Meta, and you're going to get a data center that drinks all of your fresh water.
- [36:37]
Amy Goodman
And then there was this whole controversy in Memphis around a data center.
- [36:41]
Karen Howe
Yes. So that is the data center that Elon Musk is building. So meanwhile, Musk is saying, altman is terrible. Everyone should use my AI. And of course, his AI is also being developed using the same environmental and public health costs. So he built this massive supercomputer called Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee, that's training Groan, the chatbot that people can access through X and that is being powered by around 35 unlicensed methane gas turbines that are pumping thousands of tons of toxic air pollutants into the greater Memphis community. And that community has long suffered a lack of access to clean air. A fundamental human right.
- [37:28]
Amy Goodman
So I want to go to, interestingly, Sam Altman testifying in front of Congress about solutions to the high energy consumption of artificial intelligence.
- [37:39]
Karen Howe
In the short term, I think this probably looks like more natural gas, although there are some applications where I think solar can really help. In the medium term, I hope it's advanced nuclear fission and fusion. More energy is important well beyond AI.
- [37:54]
Amy Goodman
So that's OpenAI's Sam Altman. This is testifying before the Senate and talking about everything from solar to nuclear power, something that was fought in the United States by environmental activists for decades. So you have these huge old nuclear power plants, but many say you can't make them safe, no matter how small and smart you make them.
- [38:18]
Karen Howe
This is one of the things. Of the many things that I'm concerned about with the current trajectory of AI development, this is a second order tertiary order effect. Is that because these companies are trying to claim that the AI development approach they took doesn't have climate harms? They are explicitly evoking nuclear again and again and again as nuclear will solve the problem and it has been effective. I have talked with certain AI researchers who thought the problem was solved because of nuclear. And in order to try and actually build more and more nuclear plants. They are lobbying governments to try and unwind the regulatory structure around nuclear power plant building. I mean this is like crazy on so many levels that they're not just trying to develop these the AI technology recklessly. They're also trying to lay down infrastructure and nuclear infrastructure in this move fast break things ideology.
- [39:20]
Amy Goodman
But for those who are environmentalists and have long opposed nuclear, will they be sucked in by the solar alternative?
- [39:30]
Karen Howe
So data centers have to run 247 so they cannot actually run on just renewables. That is why the companies keep trying to evoke nuclear as the solve all. But solar does not actually work when we do not have have sufficient enough energy storage solutions for that 24,7 operation.
- [39:50]
Amy Goodman
We're talking to Karen Howe, author of Empire of AI Dreams and Nightmares and Sam Altman's OpenAI. You mentioned earlier, China. You live in Hong Kong, you've covered Chinese AI USA for years. Explain what's happening in China right now.
- [40:10]
Karen Howe
Yeah, so I have to sort of explain the dynamic between China and the US first. So China and the US are the largest hubs for AI research. They are the largest concentration of AI research talent globally. China, other than Silicon Valley, China really is the only other rival in terms of talent density and the amount of capital investment and the amount of infrastructure that is going into AI development. In the last few years, what we have seen is the US government has been aggressively trying to stay number one. And one of the mechanisms that they have used is export controls. A key input into these AI models is the computational infrastructure and the computer chips for installing into the data centers, for training these models. These computer chips are, in order to develop the AI models, companies are using the most bleeding edge computer chips chip technology. It's like every two years a new chip comes out and they immediately start using that to train the next generation of AI models. Those computer chips are designed by American companies, the most prominent one being in video in California. And so the US government has been trying to use export controls to prevent Chinese companies from getting access to the most cutting edge computer chips. That has all been under the recommendation of Silicon Valley, saying this is the way to prevent China from being number one and like put export controls on them and don't regulate us at all so we can stay number one and they will fall behind. What has happened instead is because there is a strong base of talent of AI research talent in China. Under the constraints of fewer computational resources, Chinese companies have actually been able to innovate and develop the same level of AI model capabilities as American companies with two orders of magnitude less computational resources, less energy, less data. So I'm talking specifically about the Chinese company High Flyer, which developed this model called deepsea earlier this year that briefly tanked the global economy because the company said that their training, this one AI model, cost around $6 million when OpenAI was training models that cost hundreds of millions, if not over tens of billions of dollars. And that Delta demonstrated to people that this, what Silicon Valley has tried to convince everyone for the last few years, that this is the only path to getting more AI capabilities is totally false. And actually the techniques that the Chinese company was using were ones that existed in the literature and just had to be assembled. They used a lot of engineering sophistication to do that, but they weren't actually using fundamentally new techniques. They were ones that actually already existed.
- [43:18]
Amy Goodman
So let me ask you something, Karen. The latest news as you're traveling in the United States before you go back to Hong Kong, of Trump's attack on academia, how this fits in. How could Trump's attack on international students, specifically targeting the what, more than 250,000, a quarter of a million Chinese students and revoking their visas, impact the future of the AI industry? But not just, just Chinese students. Because what's going on here now is terrifying students around the world and because labs are shutting down in all kinds of ways here. US Students as well deciding to go abroad.
- [44:04]
Karen Howe
This is just the latest action that the US Government has taken over the last few years to really alienate a key talent pool for US Innovation. Originally there were more Chinese researchers working in the US Contributing to US AI than there were in China. Because just a few years ago, Chinese researchers aspired to work for American companies. They wanted to move to the U.S. they wanted to contribute to the U.S. economy. They didn't want to go back to their home home country. But because of what was called the China Initiative, which was the first Trump era initiative to try and criminalize Chinese academics or ethnically Chinese academics, some of whom were actually Americans, based on just paperwork errors, they would accuse them of being spies. That was one of the first actions. Then of course, the pandemic happened and the U. S China trade escalation started amplifying anti Chinese rhetoric, all of these led. And now with the potential ban on international students, all of these have led more and more Chinese researchers to just opt for staying at home and contributing to the Chinese AI ecosystem. And this was a prerequisite to high flyer pulling off deepseek. If there had not been that concentration and buildup of AI Talent in China, they probably would have had a much harder time innovating around, circumventing these export controls that the US Government was imposing on them. But because they now have a high concentration of top talent, some of the top talent globally, when those restrictions were imposed, they were able to innovate around them. So. So Deepseek is literally a product of this continuation of that alienation. And with the US Continuing to take this stance, it is just going to get worse. And as you mentioned, it's not just Chinese researchers. I literally just talked to a friend in academia that said she's considering going to Europe now because she just cannot survive without that public funding. And European countries are seeing a critical opportunity offering million dollar packages. Come here. We'll give you a lab. We'll give you millions of dollars of funding. I mean, this is the fastest way to brain drain this country.
- [46:40]
Amy Goodman
I mean, what many are saying, U.S. s brain drain is their brain gain. And this also reminds us of history. You have the Chinese rocket scientist Chen Xue Sen, who in the 1950s was inexplicably held under house arrest for years. And then Eisenhower has him deported to China. He becomes the father of rocket science and China's entry into space. And he said he would never again step foot into the United States, even though originally that was the only place he wanted to live.
- [47:14]
Karen Howe
Yes. And there was, I believe, a government official, a US Government official, who said that was the dumbest mistake the US Ever made.
- [47:25]
Amy Goodman
We talk about the brain drain and the brain gain. Okay, again, some more rhyming. The doomer and the boomers. I want to talk about what an AI Apocalypse looks like, meaning how it brings us to apocalypse, but also how people say it could lead us to a utopia. What are the two tracks, trajectories?
- [47:52]
Karen Howe
It's a great question. And I ask boomers and doomers this all the time. Can you articulate to me exactly how we get there? And the issue is that they cannot. And this is why I call it, IT quasi religious. It really is based on belief. I mean, I was talking with one researcher who identified as a boomer, and I said, you know, his eyes were wide and he really lit up, saying, you know, once we get to AGI, game over. Everything becomes perfect. And I asked him, I was like, can you explain to me how does AGI feed people that haven't don't have food on the table right now? And he was like, oh, you're talking about, like, the floor floor. And how to elevate their quality of life. And I was like, yes, because they are also part of all of humanity. And he was like, I'm not really sure how that would happen, but I think it could help the middle class get more economic opportunity. And I was like, okay, but how does that happen as well? And he was like, well, once these come, once we have AGI and it can just create trillions of dollars of economic value, we can just give them cash payouts. And I was like, who's giving them cash payouts? What institutions are giving them? You know, like it doesn't, when you actually test their logic, it doesn't really hold. And with the Doomers, I mean, it's the same thing. Like their belief is ultimately what I realized when reporting on the book is they believe AGI is possible because of their belief of how the human brain works. They believe human intelligence is, is inherently fully computational. So if you have enough data and you have enough computational resources, you will inevitably be able to recreate human intelligence. It's just a matter of time. And to them, the reason why that would lead to an apocalyptic scenario is humans, we learn and improve our intelligence through communication. And communication is inefficient. We miscommunicate all the time. And so for AI intelligences, they would be able to rapidly get smarter and smarter and smarter by having perfect communication with one another as digital intelligences. And so many of these people who self identify as Doomers say there has never been in the history of the universe a species that was superior to another species, a species that was able to rule over a more superior species. So they think that ultimately AI will evolve into a higher species and then start ruling us, and then maybe decide to get rid of us altogether.
- [50:27]
Amy Goodman
As we begin to wrap up, I'm wondering if you can talk about any model of a country, not a company that is pioneering a way of democratically controlled artificial intelligence.
- [50:44]
Karen Howe
I don't think it's actively happening right now. The EU has had the EU AI act, which is their major piece of legislation, trying to develop a risk based, rights based framework for governing AI deployment. But to me, one of the keys of democratic AI governance is also democratically developing. And I don't think any country is really doing that. And what I mean by that is there are. AI has a supply chain. It needs data, it needs land, it needs energy, it needs water, and it also needs spaces in which these companies need access to, to then deploy their technology. Schools, hospitals, government agencies. Silicon Valley has done a really good job over the last decade of Making people feel that their collectively owned resources are Silicon Valley's. You know, I have, I talk with friends all the time who say we don't have data privacy anymore. So, like, what's more. What's. What is more data to these companies? Like, I'm fine just giving them all of my data, but that data is yours. You know, that intellectual property is the writers and artists intellectual property. That land is a community's land. Those schools are the students and teachers, teachers schools. The hospitals are the doctors and nurses and patients hospitals. These are all sites of democratic contestation in the development and the deployment of AI. And just like those Chilean water activists that we talked about who aggressively understood that that fresh water was theirs and they were not willing to give it up unless they got some kind of mutually beneficial agreement for it. We need to have that spirit in protecting our data, our land, our water, and our schools, so that companies inevitably will have to adjust their approach because they will no longer get access to the resources they need or the spaces that they need to deploy in.
- [52:47]
Amy Goodman
In 2022, Karen, you wrote a piece for MIT Technology Review headlined A New Vision of Artificial Intelligence. Intelligence for the people. In a remote rural town in New Zealand, an indigenous couple is challenging what AI could be and who it should serve. Who are they?
- [53:05]
Karen Howe
This was a wonderful story that I did where the couple, they run Tahiku Media. It's a nonprofit Mori radio station in New Zealand. And the Mori people have suffered a lot of the same challenges as many indigenous peoples around the world. The history of colonization led them to rapidly lose their language, and there are very few Maori speakers in the world anymore. And so in the last few years, there has been an attempt to revive the language. And the New Zealand government has tried to repent by trying to encourage the revival of that language. But this nonprofit radio station, they had all of this wonderful archival material, archival audio of their ancestors speaking the Maori language that they wanted to provide to Maori speakers, Maori learners around the world, as an educational resource. The problem is, in order to do that, they needed to transcribe the audio so that Maori learners could actually listen, see what was being said, click on the words, understand the translation, and actually turn it into an active learning tool. But there were so few Maori speakers that can speak at that advanced level that they realized they had to turn to AI. And this is a key part of my book's argument is I'm not critiquing all AI development. I'm specifically critiquing the scale at all costs approach that Silicon Valley has taken. But there are many different kinds of beneficial AI models, including what they ended up doing. So they took a fundamentally different approach. First and foremost, they asked their community, do we want this AI tool? Once the community said yes, then they moved to the next tool step of asking people to fully consent to donating data for the training of this tool. They explained to the community what this data was for, how it would be used, how they would then guard that data and make sure that it wasn't used for other purposes. They collected around a couple hundred hours of audio data in just a few days because the community rallied support around this project and only a couple hundred hours was enough to create a performance speech recognition model. Which is crazy when you think about the scales of data that these Silicon Valley companies require. And that is once again a lesson that can be learned is actually there's plenty of research that shows when you have highly curated small data sets, you can actually create very powerful AI models. And then once they had that tool, they were able to do exactly what they wanted to open source and open source this educational resource to their community. And so my vision for AI development in the future is to have more small task specific AI models that are not trained on vast polluted data sets, but small curated data sets and therefore only need small amounts of computational power and can be deployed in challenges that we actually need to tackle for humanity. Mitigating climate change by integrating more renewable energy into the grid. Improving healthcare by doing more drug discovery.
- [56:13]
Amy Goodman
So as we finally do wrap up, what you were most shocked by, you've been doing this journalism, this research for years. What you were most shocked by in Right Empire of AI, I originally thought
- [56:30]
Karen Howe
that I was going to write a book focused on vertical harms of the AI supply chain. Here's how labor exploitation happens in the AI industry. Here's how the environmental harms are arising out of the AI industry. And at the end of my reporting, I realized that there's a horizontal harm that's happening here. Every single community that I spoke to, whether it was artists having their intellectual property taken or Chilean water activists having their fresh water taken, they all said that when they encountered the Empire, they initially felt exactly the same way. A complete loss of agency to self determine their future. And that is when I realized the horizontal harm here is AI is threatening democracy. If the majority of the world is going to feel this loss of agency over self determining their future, democracy cannot survive. And again, specifically Silicon Valley's approach scale at all costs AI development.
- [57:32]
Amy Goodman
But you also chronicle the resistance you talk about how the Chilean water actors felt at first, how the artists feel at first. So talk about the strategies that these people have employed and if they've been effective.
- [57:47]
Karen Howe
So the amazing thing is that there has since been so much pushback. The artists have then said, wait a minute, we can sue these companies. The Chilean water actors said, wait a minute, we can fight back and protect these water resources. The Kenyan workers that I spoke to who were contracted by OpenAI, they said, we can unionize and escalate our story to international media attention. And so even in these, even when I thought that these communities, you could argue, are the most vulnerable in the world, have the least amount of agency, they were the ones that remembered that they do have agency and that they can seize that agency and fight back. And I think it was remarkably heartening to encounter those people, to remind me that actually the first step to reclaiming democracy is remembering that no one can take your agency away.
- [58:41]
Amy Goodman
Karen Howe, author of the new book Empire of AI Dreams and Nightmares, and Sam Altman's OpenAI. Go to democracynow.org to see the full interview. And that does it for this special broadcast. I'm Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.