Through my reporting, I’ve come to understand two things: Artificial intelligence is a technology that takes many forms. It is in fact a multitude of technologies that shape-shift and evolve, not merely based on technical merit but with the ideological drives of the people who create them and the winds of hype and commercialization. While ChatGPT and other so-called large language models or generative AI applications have now taken the limelight, they are but one manifestation of AI, a manifestation that embodies a particular and remarkably narrow view about the way the world is and the way it should be. Nothing about this form of AI coming to the fore or even existing at all was inevitable; it was the culmination of thousands of subjective choices, made by the people who had the power to be in the decision-making room. In the same way, future generations of AI technologies are not predetermined. But the question of governance returns: Who will get to shape them?

The critiques that I lay out in this book of OpenAI’s and Silicon Valley’s broader vision are not by any means meant to dismiss AI in its entirety. What I reject is 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 an ultimately imperial centralization project.

Te Hiku shows us another way. It imagines how AI and its development could be exactly the opposite. Models can be small and task specific, their training data contained and knowable, ridding the incentives for widespread exploitative and psychologically harmful labor practices and the all-consuming extractivism of producing and running massive supercomputers. The creation of AI can be community driven, consensual, respectful of local context and history; its application can uplift and strengthen marginalized communities; its governance can be inclusive and democratic.

In her talk, Kalluri raised the idea of different axes of power. This book touches on three: knowledge, resources, and influence. As it stands now, OpenAI and its competitor empires have control of each of them: through centralizing talent, eroding open science, and sealing their models from public scrutiny, they control knowledge production; through hoarding funding, data, labor, compute, energy, and land, they control and diminish other people’s resources; through creating and reinforcing ideologies and producing wildly popular demonstrations that captivate global imagination, they command far-reaching influence. Each of these reinforces the other. Controlling knowledge production fuels influence; growing influence accumulates resources; amassing resources secures knowledge production.

The formula for dissolving empire thus requires the redistribution of power along each axis. The suggestions and recommendations I lay out here are exemplary but by no means comprehensive. First, to redistribute knowledge, we need greater funding to support its production outside the empire. That involves supporting researchers who can conduct independent evaluations of corporate models so we are not solely reliant on companies to understand their capabilities. It involves supporting organizations like DAIR that can pursue completely new directions of research, such as new forms of AI beyond large language models that are more efficient with data and energy. It involves supporting organizations like Te Hiku that can pursue task-specific, community-driven AI applications that strengthen marginalized communities.

Finally, to redistribute power along our third axis, influence, we need broad-based education. The antidote to the mysticism and mirage of AI hype is to teach people about how AI works, about its strengths and shortcomings, about the systems that shape its development, about the worldviews and fallibility of the people and companies developing these technologies. As Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT professor and inventor of the ELIZA chatbot, said in the 1960s, “Once a particular program is unmasked, once its inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understanding, its magic crumbles away.” I hope this book is just one offering to help induce understanding. It builds on the work of the many scholars, journalists, activists, and educators before me who have dedicated themselves to public education. May it be a new ground upon which many more after will rise up and build.