Behind the Screens: Tech Insider Stories About Power, Profit, and Peril

Having covered OpenAI, and its enigmatic founder Sam Altman, since the company’s inception in 2019, few are better positioned to recount the rise of one of the most influential forces in AI than journalist Karen Hao. Hao’s detailed, behind-the-scenes reporting unveils the internal pressures, competing ideologies, and high-stakes decisions shaping the AI landscape. Vulture called Empire of AI, "startling and intensely researched... an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us."

Written by the former director of global public policy at Facebook (now Meta), Careless People is one of the buzziest books of the year. Overcoming a temporary legal injunction which prevented author Sarah Wynn-Williams from promoting it, the book exposes disturbing tales of sexual and financial misconduct and a culture of impunity that festered amongst Facebook’s executives, in particular Mark Zuckerberg. The book, hailed by the New York Times as “darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world,” gets rave reviews from both tech insiders and the general public.

This illuminating account of the rise of OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, offers a nuanced look at one of the most significant figures shaping technology. Reporter Keach Hagey conducted more than 250 interviews with those in Altman’s closest circles, including his family, friends, and mentors, to uncover what drives him and how he rose to such prominence. The book, which also depicts in detail Altman’s complicated history with Elon Musk, was praised by legal scholar and commentator Tim Wu as “excellent and deeply reported”

For music fans, few technologies play a more significant role in their day to day lives than Spotify. The music streaming giant launched in the U.S. in 2011 as a convenient legal alternative to online music piracy and has forever changed the industry and the experience of discovering and listening to music. In this book, author Liz Pelly interviewed hundreds of former employees and musicians to illuminate the company’s inner workings and explore its sweeping, and arguably harmful, impact on music.

This book, from linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna, calls into question the hype surrounding artificial intelligence and suggests that the technology is far less revolutionary and far more damaging than the companies developing it would like us to believe. The authors break down the technology behind LLMs like ChatGPT and explain why we should be skeptical of the claims made by its creators.