Many people at Nvidia told me that Huang’s anger enforced a kind of discipline within the company, in the manner of a military general or a pro football coach. “I’m not sure he yells more than any other Fortune 500 CEO,” one employee said. “Look, it’s not really his job to be your friend. It’s his job to push you beyond where you think you could ever go.

Of more than a hundred former and current Nvidia employees I spoke with for this book, almost all had a tender story about Huang to relate. One employee—the same one whom Huang had humiliated in front of dozens of people, asking for a full refund of his salary—told me that when he was later diagnosed with a serious medical issue, Huang offered to pay in full, out of pocket, for his treatment. When Ben Garlick decided to leave Nvidia for a start-up, he was startled to receive an impassioned, personal plea from Huang to stay.

That “freak coincidence” revealed a disturbing formula. When faced with economic collapse, Venezuela suddenly checked off the perfect mix of conditions for which to find an inexhaustible supply of cheap labor: Its population had a high level of education, good internet connectivity, and, now, a zealous desire to work for whatever wages. It was not the only country that fit that description. More populations were getting wired to better internet. And with accelerating climate change and growing geopolitical instability, it was hard to bet against more populations plunging into crisis. “It’s quite likely there will be another Venezuela,” Schmidt said.

In Telegram and Discord groups, Fuentes traded tips with other Venezuelans working on Appen as they sought to deduce the rules like an elaborate puzzle. They discovered that using a VPN to appear to be in the US earned them the most money. They also learned—the hard way—that it was a high-risk endeavor. Appen searched for this kind of behavior, which was a violation of platform rules, and punished workers by closing their accounts. An account closure could be devastating. Any earnings a worker hadn’t withdrawn would vanish, and opening up a fresh account meant starting back at the bottom, with the least-well-paid tasks or, increasingly, no tasks at all.

Scale downgraded Kenya to a Group 5 designation: blacklisted. There was also another reason to exit Kenya. By then, Scale was moving on to a new focus, following the demands of the AI industry. OpenAI and its competitors were increasingly searching for highly educated workers to perform RLHF—doctors, coders, physicists, people with PhDs. So went the profit-chasing progression of chatbot development. Those willing to pay money for chatbots were not casual consumers but businesses that expected tools to perform complex tasks such as in science and software development. Kenya did not fulfill the new labor demand. Scale was now recruiting a fresh workforce primarily in the US with a new worker-facing platform called Outlier, offering as much as forty dollars an hour.

It was yet another stark illustration of the logic of AI empires. Behind promises of their technologies enhancing productivity, unlocking economic freedom, and creating new jobs that would ameliorate automation, the present-day reality has been the opposite. Companies pad their bottom lines, while the most economically vulnerable lose out and more and more highly educated people become ventriloquists for chatbots.

The empire’s devaluing of the human labor that serves it is also just a canary: It foretells how the technologies produced atop this logic will devalue the labor of everyone else. In fact, for the artists, writers, and coders whose labor the empires of AI turned into free training data, that is already happening.

Scale’s decision would send Winnie and her family spiraling. By then Millicent had lost her job and Remotasks had been the only thing keeping them afloat. Now they were struggling to feed their kids. Winnie was terrified they would soon be evicted. In her inbox, the email Scale sent to inform workers of the shutdown was cold and clinical: “We are discontinuing operations in your current location,” it read. “You have been off-boarded from your current project.”