The Download: a conversation with Karen Hao, and how did life begin?

In a wide-ranging Roundtables conversation for MIT Technology Review subscribers, journalist and author Karen Hao recently spoke about her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI.

She talked with executive editor Niall Firth about how she first covered the company in 2020 while on staff at MIT Technology Review. They discussed how the AI industry now functions like an empire and went on to examine what ethically-made AI looks like.

Read the transcript of the conversation, which has been lightly edited and condensed. And, if you’re already a subscriber, you can watch the on-demand recording of the event here.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: How did life begin?

How life begins is one of the biggest and hardest questions in science. All we know is that something happened on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, and it may well have occurred on many other worlds in the universe as well. Could AI help us to unpick the mysteries around the origins of life and detect signs of it on other worlds?

This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which
we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 xAI’s Grok went on an anti-Semitic rant
Days after Elon Musk said new updates would lessen its reliance on mainstream media. (WP $)
+ The chatbot started to call itself ‘MechaHitler.’ (WSJ $)
+ What Grok’s neo-Nazi turn tells us about xAI. (The Atlantic $)