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Hey everyone,
Hope you’ve had a great July.
It’s been hot, hot, hot in Toronto and Leslie and I have been soaking in some downtime with the kids. I’ve been in 22 cities so far this year for keynote speeches and podcasts so—per our family contract—I’m aiming for an offline, or at least more grounded, July and August. Swimming, sandcastles, sunsets, s'mores, stories, stars...
Of course July was also Canada Day so I published ‘Canada Is Awesome’ (HTML, PDF, audio, paper) and did a follow-up interview with 91-year-old former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien (Apple, Spotify, YouTube).
This month I found myself staying up late deep into the investigative journalism masterpiece of ‘Empire of AI’ by Karen Hao. My review, along with others I read this month, below.
Thanks for spending some time with me instead of the bots.
Let's get to it!
Neil
1. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao. I have a love-hate relationship with AI. I love looking up "a baby Bok Choy recipe I can make in 7 minutes" but hate the homogenizing effect it’s seemingly having on writing ... on quality? ... on culture? I think I disagree with Rick Rubin when he says AI "supercharges creativity." Then again maybe I just don’t want to be supercharged by robots even if they are awesome? Could be my bias coming in. I admit I had little history, knowledge, or questions to help me wade through early thoughts on AI. But that’s where Karen Hao’s magisterial 496-page opus comes in. On the back cover Shoshanna Zuboff, who wrote my #1 book of 2023 ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ calls this a “heroic work” of “essential public education.” It is. Hao comes in asking questions like: What even is intelligence? Start there! Anyone know? Anyone? OK, so then what is … ‘artificial’ intelligence? Could it be a marketing term from the 50s? It could! And wait, what about … artificial ‘general’ intelligence? AGI? “I think it’s a ridiculous and meaningless term,” Sam Altman told The New York Times in 2023. "So I apologize that I keep using it." Bandied about like badminton birds but no consensus despite, no biggie, these terms underpinning billion-dollar contracts which are accelerating an arms race to build the most-fastest Manhattan-sized (!) data centres so we can scrape all of our collective human output and feed it back to us to potentially unemploy and/or garn us? But that’s my bias, that’s my bias, sorry, backtracking, backtracking. OK, so terms aren’t clear. Doesn’t matter! Because what is clear is everybody’s suddenly using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, whatever. Few months ago Leslie was helping her mom download chatGPT and I heard her say "I don’t even Google anything anymore!" Now my group chat with my oldest friends is filling up with AI images while one member of the group is laying off the staff at his 20-year-old animation company. What is going on? I don’t understand it. I am slow. Real time is too fast for me. This book slowed me down, helped me look back, and see all the heavy moving gears. Karen Hao gave us the first-ever company profile of OpenAI over five years ago in the MIT Technology Review and now she’s back with this engrossing, propulsive, illuminating portrait that traces the many tentacles of this emerging giant squid. I should mention the whole idea of how this book was made is somewhat antithetical to the rush-rush-rush of today with old-timey things like research teams and human fact-checkers. (In the Acknowledgements Hao thanks many sources who spoke to her “despite legal or other risks” along with Penguin Press’s team of lawyers as well as a deep four-person “fact-checking team” who “fastidiously combed through the draft, cross-checking the labyrinth of details against documents and sources, and stress-testing my word choices”.) So what’s her thesis? It’s in the title! AI is emerging like a new empire—like colonialist overlords stealing, taking, raping, pillaging—but on Page 413 Hao writes that she rejects "the dangerous notion that broad benefit from AI can only be derived from—indeed, will ever emerge from—a vision for the technology that requires the complete capitulation of our privacy, our agency, and our worth, including the value of our labor and art, toward and ultimately imperial centralization project.” Amen! In one vivid story we follow Hao to Kenya and hear about Mophat Okinyi who was left by his wife after a stint doing content moderation work for OpenAI—humans apparently still turning cranks in the basement of this thing!—which left him and his coworkers severely traumatized. There were “hundreds of thousands of grotesque text-based descriptions they needed to read and sort into categories of severity. Was it violence or extremely graphic violence, harassment or hate speech, child sexual abuse or bestiality?” Um. Yeah. It gets dark. Turns out when you scrape all the content on the Internet you get a lot of nasty stuff, too. Just a small negative externality? Mayyyybe. But then we go to Chile and read about what these new AI data centres are doing to people and animals hearing them hum from miles away. We go all over in this book! And then something obvious emerges: That to have the confidence, conviction, and charisma necessary to grow a company from nothing to everything you need to go against your original stated open spirit and purpose. “The most successful founders do not set out to create companies,” Sam Altman says. “They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.” Hao shares an excerpt from a 2018 interview with Tyler Cowan where Altman says it’s “impressive” that Napoleon Bonaparte was able to use the country’s national motto—“Liberté, egalité, fraternité”—to be endlessly reinterpreted to consolidate his own power. On Page 401 she shows Altman doing the same thing. How? Well, "in 2015, its mission meant being a nonprofit ‘unconstrained by a need to generate financial return' and open sourcing research… in 2016 it meant ‘everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it’s totally OK to not share the science'… in 2018 and 2019 it meant introducing a new capped profit structure to “marshal substantial resources", in 2022 it meant "racing as fast as possible to deploy chatGPT", and in 2024 Altman was saying "A key part of our mission is to put very capable AI tools in the hands of people for free (or at a great price)." It should be said Altman does not come out looking great here. Though there's a clear lack of connection between Altman and Hao—he evidently stopped talking to her after the 2020 profile—the stories she digs up may make you pause, grimace, or worry. She has an email from fellow co-founder Ilya Sutskever to Altman and Musk saying "We don't understand why the CEO title is so important to you. Your stated reasons have changed ... How does it connect to your political goals?" and there is a clear pattern of three organizations in a row of charmingly-deceitful behaviour that baffles or mystifies reports through seemingly hypocritical behaviour. As one example Hao reveals that Altman fake-positioned his exit from running Y Combinator (YC) as a strategic shift to Chairman when nobody running YC ever agreed or approved that and then, after he wrote about his new not-real title YC actually took the dramatic step of scrubbing his name completely from the post. Big news right!? Not when the next day you put out a press release saying you're now CEO of OpenAI! I ate up the history in this book. Because that's one thing on AI that won't change. It feels vital to learn it. Like how at Elon Musk’s 2013 birthday party in Napa a disagreement with Larry Page left Elon labeled a “speciesist” after Elon said AI surpassing human intelligence was an issue ... to the 2015 dinner party at Altman’s house where he and Elon hatched the concept of OpenAI. (Elon later said in a lawsuit that it was as if “Altman had mirrored everything Musk had ever said about the subject to win his trust.”). Then Elon’s departure, then mission creep, then a racing evolution. Bill Gates makes a couple industry-altering cameos. “The Divorce” is catalogued where a number of OpenAI employees revolted after OpenAI started taking private money and then disembarked en masse to begin rival Anthropic (who make Claude). Proclamations! Ramifications! A vast, sweeping, deep “how of history” book to help us understand and much-more-clearly see and witness the phenomenon of AI. Get it at a library, in audio, or get it from a bookstore. A powerful book offering clarity and truth.
2. Peterson Field Guides: Eastern Butterflies by Paul A. Opler and Vichai Malikul. I never really noticed butterflies until this year. I could identify a Monarch. That’s it! Just that one. I knew Monarchs were striking and elegant and wondrous and I’d seen a nature show talking about how they migrate to this sacred forest in Mexico where you might in one day and see something like this:
More recently I’d heard they don’t even migrate the whole way—it’s a multi-generational affair! The Monarchs overwintering in Mexico are actually the great-great-grandchildren (!) of the Monarchs we might see flying south. Then last year I walked through an alley in Toronto called “Mourning Cloak Lane” and looked up the Mourning Cloak butterfly and discovered that they overwinter in Canada. Really!
They hide in rocks and tree bark and enter hibernation as part of their 10 to 11 month long life-cycle … one of the longest of all butterflies! So I borrowed this field guide from my grandparents-in-law and have just picked up 'The ROM Field Guide to Butterflies of Ontario' (2014) and now I’m suddenly noticing butterflies everywhere. On people’s shoulders, fluttering above milkweed, floating above gardens. They’re so stunning, so fragile, so wild, so free. They’re so acrobatic, so otherworldly, so fleeting. When this guide was published in 1992 there were 522 known species of butterflies “east of the 100th meridian” (which in North America runs from around Winnipeg to Wichita to Mexico City) and on Page 4 Opler says he answers the question about what a butterfly even is by saying “Butterflies fly in the day, are brightly coloured, and have clubbed antenna.” Easy enough! Also helps differentiate from moths. He goes on to tell us if we’re in a “middle east” latitude (Toronto, New York, Chicago, Philly, Atlanta, etc) then “In early spring, as buds are just beginning to open, you can find Falcate Orangetips, the first whites, Spring Azures, Silvery Blues, elfins, duskywings, overwintered adults of Mourning Cloaks, tortoiseshells, and anglewings. Most swallowtails, brushfoots, and true skippers don’t begin their flights until late spring or early summer, while mid- to late summer is a time when you should expect hairstreaks, fritillaries, some skippers, and immigrants from further south.” Hairstreaks? Skippers? Duskywings? I love their names. I love their lives! Butterflies, along with some beetles and wasps, have four life stages. Most bugs have three (eggs, nymphs, adults) but butterflies go egg, larva (caterpillars), pupa (chrysalis), adults. I have long, long believed anything that can grow wings is awesome. But I haven’t really noticed butterflies till now. As always: The more you look the more you see. They fly away quickly so I’m often stuck thinking “it was dark blue, with white spots on the edge of the wings…” before I can look it up. But starting somewhere! Butterfly-watchers / lepidopterists—please share any thoughts, advice, or favourites. Just reply to this email!
3. Time Is A Mother by Ocean Vuong. I read and loved 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' by Ocean Vuong and thought I’d flip open his more recent book of his poetry. It is … different. Apparently the poems are about Vuong’s loss of his mother in 2019 and the emotions he felt during the pandemic. He calls this his “proudest book” and yeah it has some of that similar chilly and poignant emotional breeze. But sometimes, for me, the aesthetic complexity didn’t quite land. Either way: this is a book that forces you to slow down, to try and take words in slowly, and for that reason alone I found it meditative. These are poems you could easily read again right away, see something new, then read them again. It's around 30 poems over 113 pages and here’s the opening 10 lines of the poem “The Last Prom Queen From Antarctica” from Page 36 to give you a vibe: “It’s true I’m all talk & a French tuck / but so what. Like the wind, I ride / my own life. Neon light electric / in the wet part of roadkill / on the street where I cut my teeth / on the good sin. I want to / take care of our planet / because I need a beautiful / graveyard. It’s true I’m not a writer / but a faucet underwater. When the flood comes / I’ll raise my hand so they know / who to shoot. The sky flashes. The sea" ... now do you want to keep going? That's only a third of it! If yes, you’ll like the poems here. I loved ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ and may pick up his new novel ‘The Emperor of Gladness’ next. Vuong is a writer that pushes you somewhere else.
4. The Second Herman Treasury by Jim Unger. I think maybe that AI book crisped my brain a little given how I found myself itching for the balm of butterflies, poetry, and 80s cartoons afterwards. Backstory on this one was Leslie and I were driving down the main street of Bracebridge, Ontario this month and spotted a used bookstore called The Owl Pen. I just love used bookstores. Malcolm Gladwell and I talked about used bookstores and he helped teach me they sort of pull together the minds—attics? basements?—of a town to say something interesting about how they think and what they value. When Leslie and I walked in we walked past a huge shelf of frayed blue hardcover ‘Hardy Boys’ and frayed yellow hardcover ‘Nancy Drews’ before hitting a little collection on local and indigenous histories and then discovering an incredible children’s section at the back where I picked up a giant hardcover picture book 'The Call of the Wild' by Jack London (08/2023). But then! It happened! I turned a corner and looked up high and way up on the top of a bookshelf to the ceiling and high above me was a stack of ‘Herman’ treasuries—one even signed!—for like… thirty dollars total? Truly priceless:
