This book chronicles the rise of OpenAI and its eventual decline - the exodus, Sam Altman and the rest.

There were a few details about Sam Altman’s ouster that I had not read about earlier. It does not paint Sam Altman in a good light. I have never liked him. Perhaps because of that, I have gone to Claude. Anyway, this book details a fair bit of his toxic traits and behaviours.

The book discussed the dark shady underbelly of the AI industry, the people sitting in the global south doing the annotations on videos and so on. I knew about those things. So they were not surprising. It was hard reading through these parts. Tells you how well these AI companies have painted the public discourse.

While reading the parts about the environmental impact of these massive DCs, I wanted to shout - you don’t get tech. We need this infra. But do we? Can we not build more efficient smaller task-specific models?

It’s a good read.