karen's hao "empire of ai" is bad
mostly because she is so incredibly emotional. one thing that irritated me a lot was sharing the story of a guy from kenya who did RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback, basically rating chat gpt's answers and going through illegal / disturbing ones). after some time of doing that, his girlfriend broke up with him. i think that karen hao is insinuating that it happened because the work has affected him so much.
- that has nothing to do with the promise of the book, which is being focused on the empire of ai, specifically sam altman. is this even relevant at all?
- if it is relevant, have the balls to at least accuse OAI of influencing people's mental health negatively instead of spending god knows how many pages talking about this dude's private life and just assuming we as the readers will agree with you
she is obviously very into DEI which is neutral in and of itself, but she is presenting the need for DEI as the clear goal. ok, that's what you think, can you convince the reader of this? especially non-american ones? or is your audience only americans? really annoying when people just assume the whole world is in tune with the US social issues (english is an international language these days) and again this does not deliver on the promise of telling us about "dreams and nightmares of sam altman". or LLMs, or ChatGPT, or just anything interesting. she's so up her ass that she forgot to make the book fun and honestly that is my biggest issue with it.
ps. criticizing colonialism while working for the wall street journal is pinnacle of hypocriticy.