382. Empire of AI: Karen Hao On Today’s Hidden Colonialism (Ep 2)

“The best way to start a religion is to start a company.” Sam Altman wrote that line in a blog post years before he became the face of OpenAI. Journalist Karen Hao, who embedded inside OpenAI in 2019 and has spent seven years researching her book Empire of AI, argues that Altman was not joking. The line captures something essential about how AI companies operate: they build myths to mobilize money, talent, and public permission. And those myths, Hao says, echo the civilizing missions of historical empires.

AI Is Not One Thing—It’s a Fleet of Different Machines

Hao opens with a crucial distinction. “The word AI is like the word transportation,” she says. “It refers to a collection of technologies that can be vastly different—the way that bicycles and rockets are very, very different.” Old-school Google search was a bicycle: it extracted language patterns from your query and from web pages, then matched them. The large language models behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are rockets. They process enormous quantities of language data before you ever type a question, then generate answers in real time based on statistical patterns, not discrete facts.