(0:00 ) Intro 

(1:49 ) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel

(2:36 ) Introduction by Professor Anat Admati, Stanford Graduate School of Business. Read the event coverage from Stanford's CASI.

(4:14 ) Start of Interview

(4:45 ) What inspired Karen to write this book and how she got started with journalism.

(8:00 ) OpenAI's Nonprofit Origin Story

(8:45 ) Sam Altman and Elon Musk's Collaboration

(10:39 ) The Shift to For-Profit

(12:12 ) On the original split between Musk and Altman over control of OpenAI

(14:36 ) The Concept of AI Empires

(18:04 ) About concept of "benefit to humanity" and OpenAI's mission "to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity"

(20:30 ) On Sam Altman's Ouster and OpenAI's Boardroom Drama (Nov 2023) "Doomers vs Boomers"

(26:05 ) Investor Dynamics Post-Ouster of Sam Altman

(28:21 ) Prominent Departures from OpenAI (ie Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, Ilya Sutskever, Mira Murati, etc)

(30:55 ) The Geopolitics of AI: U.S. vs. China

(32:37 ) The "What about China" Card used by US companies to ward off regulation.

(34:26 ) "Scaling at All Costs is not leading us in a good place"

(36:46 ) Karen's preference on ethical AI development "I really want there to be more participatory AI development. And I think about the full supply chain of AI development when I say that."

(39:53 ) Her biggest hope and fear for the future "the greatest threat of these AI empires is the erosion of democracy."

(43:34 ) The case of Chilean Community Activism and Empowerment

(47:20 ) Recreating human intelligence and the example of Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT (Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976)

(51:15 ) OpenAI's current AI research capabilities: "I think it's asymptotic because they have started tapping out of their scaling paradigm"

(53:26 ) The state (and importance of) open source development of AI. "We need things to be more open"

(55:08 ) The Bill Gates demo on chatGPT acing the AP Biology test.

(58:54 ) Funding academic AI research and the public policy question on the role of Government.

(1:01:11 ) Recommendations for Startups and Universities

Karen Hao is the author of Empire of AI (Penguin Press, May 2025) and an award-winning journalist covering the intersections of AI & society.

You can follow Evan on social media at:

X: @evanepstein

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ 

Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/

__

To support this podcast you can join as a subscriber of the Boardroom Governance Newsletter at https://evanepstein.substack.com/

__

Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License