Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, is one of the world's most famous and secretive companies.

It's on a mission to try to develop artificial general intelligence or AGI.

That's a theoretical type of AI that possesses human intelligence and can perform any intellectual task a person can, as opposed to more

specific tasks like image recognition or how to win a chess. Investigator journalist Karen Howe's

new book, Empire of AI, Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI offers a skeptical look

at where the company is headed.

Here's Ali Rogan.

Karen, thank you so much for joining us.

You've been following OpenAI from the very beginning when it introduced itself as a research nonprofit with very lofty goals.

Tell us about those early days.

Yeah, so I was the first journalist to ever

profile OpenAI, and I embedded within the company for three days in August of 2019. And the reason

why I thought it was worth profiling them in that moment in time is because they were beginning

to shift away from those nonprofit origins. They had just restructured to put a for-profit within the nonprofit that suggested there

would be some kind of commercial intent later on.

And I was asking executives and employees to explain to me what was the mission.

And they insisted that the mission was the same, that they were trying to ultimately

build AI completely without commercial interest and they were going to be open and collaborative

and they wanted this technology to be ushered into the public purely for social benefit. And that is not what I found.

I found that they were very competitive, they were very secretive,

and that certainly they had to have some kind of commercialization plan

because they had just received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.

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