Sat, Mar 14
|St. John's Methodist Church
Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI.
Please note: the event will be held at St. John's United Methodist Church, 1200 Old Pecos Trail. A co-presentation with New Energy Economy, YUCCA, and Defend NM Water.
Date, Time & Location
Mar 14, 2026, 11:00 AM MDT
St. John's Methodist Church, 1200 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe, NM 87505, USA
About the Event
New Energy Economy will be Zooming the event, register to watch it here on Zoom
When investigative journalist and AI expert Karen Hao began covering OpenAI in 2019, she believed in its founding promise: a nonprofit built to ensure artificial intelligence would be developed safely and responsibly. But as the AI race accelerated, she uncovered a far more troubling reality. In Empire of AI, Hao traces how the pursuit of ever-larger language models demands vast computing power, massive data extraction, low-paid data labor across the Global South, and enormous energy and water use—concentrating power in the hands of a few global tech giants. Drawing on deep reporting inside OpenAI, including the dramatic firing and return of Sam Altman, and voices from Silicon Valley engineers to Kenyan data workers and Chilean water activists, Hao reveals how the forces shaping AI are creating a new kind of technological empire—and asks where this…