Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI
From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman’s OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy, When […]
Graydon Carter hired Christopher Hitchens, pissed off Trump and revealed Deep Throat
Julian Novitz Senior Lecturer, Writing, Department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology. The editor of Vanity Fair, Radhika Jones, is stepping down after seven years. Amid the media buzz about who might take her role – long considered a plum one – is a surprising question. “Is it still […]
When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines
From the pages of Vanity Fair to the red carpets of Hollywood, editor Graydon Carter’s memoir revives the glamorous heyday of print magazines when they were at the vanguard of American culture When Graydon Carter was offered the editorship of Vanity Fair in 1992, he knew he faced an uphill battle—how to […]
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
by Sarah Wynn-Williams Power and corruption – the power system we live in – accountability. Think about the systems you are a part of. Being careless can have huge consequences. Working for Mark Zuckerberg may not be the best option and did Sheryl Sandberg “Lean In’ too far? An explosive […]
The EU will spend billions more on defence. It’s a powerful statement – but won’t do much for Ukraine
Jessica Genauer, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Flinders University. On March 3, US President Donald Trump paused all US military aid to Ukraine. This move was apparently triggered by a heated exchange a few days earlier between Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. In response, […]
In siding with Russia over Ukraine, Trump is not putting America first – he is hastening its decline
Matthew Sussex, Associate Professor (Adj), Griffith Asia Institute; and Fellow, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University. Has any nation squandered its diplomatic capital, plundered its own political system, attacked its partners and supplicated itself before its far weaker enemies as rapidly and brazenly as Donald Trump’s America? The […]
Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life
by Agnes Callard An iconoclastic philosopher revives Socrates for our time, showing how we can answer―and, in the first place, ask―life’s most important questions. Socrates has been hiding in plain sight. We call him the father of Western philosophy, but what exactly are his philosophical views? He is famous for […]
With 14 community newspapers due to close, too many parts of NZ are becoming ‘news deserts’
Greg Treadwell, Senior Lecturer in Journalism, Auckland University of Technology When media company NZME proposed the closure of 14 community newspapers last week, the so-called “news desert” encroached a little further into the local information landscape. The term refers to those many regions in both town and country where newspapers […]
Orbital wins the Booker
Samantha Harvey’s Orbital has won the 2024 Booker prize. What it so skilfully and ambitiously exposes is the human cost of space flight set against the urgency of the climate crisis. While a typhoon of life-threatening proportions gathers across south-east Asia, six astronauts and cosmonauts hurtle around Earth on the […]
The Chairman’s Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out
How power, money and influence work in Australia Before Covid, both Qantas and its CEO Alan Joyce were flying high, the darlings of customers, staff and investors. After Covid hit, only money mattered – in particular, the company’s share price and extraordinary executive bonuses. Illegally redundant workers, unethical flight credits, […]
What is AI superintelligence? Could it destroy humanity? And is it really almost here?
Flora Salim, Professor, School of Computer Science and Engineering, inaugural Cisco Chair of Digital Transport & AI, UNSW Sydney. Maxim Berg / Unsplash In 2014, the British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a book about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) with the ominous title Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. It proved […]
The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World
A globe shows the world we think we know: neatly delineated sovereign nations that grant or restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside their borders, however, another universe has been engineered into existence. It consists of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, and increasingly for the […]
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI
From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman’s OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy, When AI expert and 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, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realiaed 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 and 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, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and 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 and the industry, and so she was in intimate […]