A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAn eyeopening account of the tech arms race shaping out planet from an awardwinning journalist and AI insider to the world of Sam Altman and OpenAIWhen longtime AI expert and 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 it was meant its leader Sam Altman told us to act as a check against more purely market forces. But the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that it requires an unprecedented amount of proprietary resources the compute power of scarce highend chips the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale the humans on the ground cleaning it up for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South and a truly alarming spike in the need for energy and water underlying everything.