📚 AZ Dems Readers & Leaders Book Club

Selection for September 16: Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI, by Karen Hao - first session of a two-part discussion. The second will be held at the October 21 book club meeting.

Register for Zoom link: https://secure.ngpvan.com/7cTbZ9ks6Eal_zJJ4q707Q2.
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When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?

Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?

Please Note: You must register through VAN to receive a Zoom link. Joining the Meetup event alone is not enough. RSVP here: https://secure.ngpvan.com/7cTbZ9ks6Eal_zJJ4q707Q2

Hosted by LD12 Dems, this is a book club for Democrats throughout the state who want to read and discuss relevant, thought-provoking books with other Democrats. They focus on books that encourage lively discussion and help us to better understand, protect and defend our democratic values. Meetings are virtual, on the 3rd Tuesday of the month from 7 - 8:00pm