prolog

Part 1.
Dream: Towards the greatest invention in human history

Chapter 1.
The Seeds of OpenAI
Chapter 2. Aspirations for the Dream of AI
Chapter 3.
A persistent belief in the future
Chapter 4. AGI, the Key to Saving Humanity
Chapter 5.
Towards Utopia, Towards Money
Chapter 6.
The prelude to competition

Part 2.
Goliaths: Are They Really Innovative?

Chapter 7.
AlphaGo, astonishing the world
Chapter 8.
“Everything is great”
Chapter 9.
Goliath's Paradox

Part 3.
Capital: A Noble Mission Bowing Before Money

Chapter 10.
In the end, size matters
Chapter 11.
frustrated dreams
Chapter 12.
broken promise

Part 4.
Competition: A fight for the future of humanity

Chapter 13.
Hello, ChatGPT
Chapter 14.
End of Humanity Marketing
Chapter 15.
Checkmate
Chapter 16: Where Will AI Take Us?

Acknowledgements
source

"Search gives you information, but AI gives you intelligence."
Two giants of AI development, Sam Altman and Hassabis
A three-dimensional view of the technology war
Following the convergence and disintegration of Silicon Valley's Big Tech industry!

Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind are both visionaries who dreamed of developing AI with limitless capabilities, and are innovators who have made a new mark on the AI ​​industry and led it forward.
Sam Altman was a man of strong leadership and self-confidence since high school. He was fascinated by computers and the Internet. After entering Stanford University, he jumped into entrepreneurship and founded Y Combinator, a networking service that connects investors and entrepreneurs, emerging as a key figure in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem.
For Sam Altman, AI was a tool that would enrich human life and a new business idea.
His goal was a practical and public-spirited one: to use AI to bring economic prosperity to all humanity, enabling them to live better lives.

Demis Hassabis, on the other hand, was a game developer and scientist.
As a scholar, I studied brain science and neuroscience to find the answer to the question, "What is intelligence?" and tried to implement the very way humans think using AI technology.
His ambition was not simply technological innovation, but to use AI technology to solve all the world's fundamental problems, including uncovering the origins of life and the nature of the universe, and curing diseases.
“If you solve the puzzle of intelligence, you can solve everything else,” he said.

DeepMind, founded by Hassabis, was the first AI startup to declare that it would not use AI technology commercially, especially for military purposes, and that it was a strictly ethical and science-driven organization.
Hassabis focused on developing an AGI model that mirrored the structure, memory, and cognitive abilities of the human brain, an approach that prioritized research outcomes over commercialization of the technology.
But as AI technology became increasingly feasible, Hassabis decided he needed capital and resources—namely, big tech companies—and joined hands with Google.
In 2014, DeepMind was acquired by Google and began developing more aggressively, shocking the world with AlphaGo, the first AI to beat humans.

Hassabis couldn't help but marvel at the intricate workings of the brain.
After closing the door to the elixir, he often found himself lost in thought.
Perhaps the key to developing software as smart as humans lies in the brain itself.
Anyway, I thought that we should study the brain deeply to understand it properly, because it is the only evidence in the world that shows that general intelligence is possible.
Is the brain merely a physical and biological organ, or is it something more? To find the answer, we needed to delve into neuroscience.

_Page 78 of the text

Altman burst onto the AI ​​scene in 2015, a year after Google's acquisition of DeepMind, by co-founding the non-profit organization OpenAI with prominent Silicon Valley investors such as Elon Musk and Greg Brockman.
While he ostensibly aims to create a safe AGI for all of humanity, he soon realizes that he desperately lacks the funding and computing resources to secure the technology.
In particular, after his relationship with big-time investor Elon Musk soured, he struggled to find other investors in Silicon Valley.


Elon Musk originally intended to absorb OpenAI into Tesla to develop its technology more aggressively and to apply AI technology to autonomous driving and space engineering.
However, as Musk continued to try to commercialize OpenAI's technology, Sam Altman broke up with Elon Musk and instead secured massive investment through a strategic partnership with Microsoft.
The rationale he gave was that more money and resources were ultimately needed to safely develop the technology without interference from investors like Elon Musk.


Ironically, during this process, Altman feels pressured to first create an AI that can be released into the world immediately.
Ultimately, we successfully launched ChatGPT in November 2022, achieving commercialization of AI technology faster than anyone else.

In February 2018, OpenAI announced new donors and briefly announced that Musk was leaving the company.
But they glossed over Musk's resignation, stating that his departure was for ethical reasons.
The issue was that Tesla's AI research would create a conflict of interest with OpenAI.
(...) They thought that although Musk emphasizes the development of safe AI, he also has a strong desire to become the protagonist who creates the world's best AI.
Musk was already one of the world's richest men and wielded unprecedented influence over America's infrastructure. NASA was partnering with SpaceX to launch astronauts into space, Tesla was pioneering electric vehicles, and Musk's satellite internet company, Starlink, was accelerating the development of technologies that would later prove crucial in the Ukrainian War.
_Main text, pages 152-153

Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman had different paths, but their competition and struggles ultimately determined the pace and direction of AI technology development.
"Hegemony" doesn't just show the technological development process, investment attraction, and management strategies of these two companies. It vividly shows how AI technology is transformed into a management tool for giant Big Tech companies under the corporate logic of Silicon Valley through corporate structure, decision-making processes, conflicts between investors and management, and the timing of product launches.


In the complex triangle of technology, capital, and regulation,
Will AI be the hope of the future?
Surrounding technological development and ethics,
A surprising insight into the greatest dilemma of the 21st century.

Both Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman entered AI development with noble ideals, and they ran their companies with constant concern for the safety and ethics of their technology.
Was this couple's choice truly the right one? Ultimately, it wasn't.
Hassabis' DeepMind lost its independence when it was acquired by Google, AlphaGo was no longer an innovation, and DeepMind's project was relegated to being Google's advertising model and search engine tool.
Altman's OpenAI also tried to secure autonomy by establishing itself as a limited profit corporation, but Microsoft's influence continued to grow.
Ultimately, control of technology was handed over to Microsoft and Google, and the concentration of technology and wealth in the hands of a few companies became a reality.
Meanwhile, the AI ​​industry promises a bright future, promising to use technology to increase productivity and make more useful information readily available.
But innovation comes at a price.


The AI ​​industry, backed by big tech companies, collects and utilizes massive amounts of internet data for AI training, yet it doesn't disclose which data it uses.
In particular, OpenAI uses a vast amount of public data, including documents, news, papers, books, and community posts, to train its GPT model, but does not disclose the scope or source of the training data.
Data verification and social surveillance are becoming increasingly difficult, and AI technologies that have lost transparency are acquiring biased data and producing more biased data.
This has exacerbated the problem of hallucination, which involves the mass production and distribution of misinformation, and the EU is even considering legally regulating this in 2025.


In fact, cases where AI only outputs images of white men for the keyword 'CEO' or classifies black people as 'gorillas' show how serious AI bias is.
And this biased data is deeply embedded in our daily lives through social media and the media, without careful review or proper management of its impact on public perception.


Recently, Google's computer vision algorithm classified a black person as a gorilla.
It's called 'gorilla'.
Some try to explain this away by saying that the algorithm chose skin color as an important identifier for classifying humans.
If there had been even one Black person, or someone with a sense of racial awareness, on the AI ​​software development team, a service that classifies Black people as gorillas would never have been launched.
_Page 189

"Hegemony" addresses these concerns, examining the male-dominated culture of the AI ​​technology industry and how minorities are marginalized within it. The voices of young female engineers in AI development, non-developers, and those raising ethical concerns are often ignored or ridiculed. Those concerned about AI ethics emphasize that technological fairness must be ensured throughout the development process, arguing that technologies that fail to reflect the perspectives of minorities will ultimately lead to an unfair future for the majority of society.

At this point, "Hegemony" goes beyond technology and asks what choices we must make in this moment. How should we understand, utilize, and control AI? For whom is AI truly a technology? And what should a society in which AI and humanity coexist look like? The future of AI and humanity presents yet another set of social issues and ethical responsibilities that must be addressed.


Meanwhile, OpenAI and DeepMind have been working to build defenses against abuse of the high-performance AI systems they build.
DeepMind has been working to create a corporate governance structure that would prevent Google, a profit-driven monopoly, from using AGI as a means of making money.
The idea was to have a committee of expert advisors oversee the development and use of AI.
Altman and Musk founded OpenAI as a nonprofit research institute, promising to share the organization's research and patented technologies with other organizations as they near the point of developing superintelligent machines.
It was a path for the public good of humanity.
_Page 154 of the text

"A Rich Guide to the New World Awaiting Brave Humanity"
Between AI utopia and AI dystopia,
A must-read for a new era

In addition to Google acquiring DeepMind and Microsoft investing in OpenAI, countless other companies and countries are jumping into the AI ​​industry, throwing the world into rapid chaos.
The struggle for hegemony brought about by the advancement of AI technology is no longer limited to the AI ​​industry.
It is changing the global economy and the flow of capital, shaking the foundations of corporate strategy, restructuring the regulatory and public policy framework, and creating numerous social side effects.
Technology companies and governments around the world are grappling with these challenges and grappling with the fierce competition to stay at the forefront of AI development.
Another new direction is that China's DeepSec, mentioned earlier, is pursuing AI transparency through open source orientation.
South Korea, caught between China's openness and the West's commercialization, is also building a new AI ecosystem.


"Hegemony" neither prematurely optimistically predicts the outcome of this struggle for hegemony, nor is it pessimistic about the social issues surrounding AI.
This is a vivid, on-site report, providing a close-up view of the unfolding conflict between technology, capital, ethics, and power, and a faithful record of the first page of the new turning point we face today.
It contains insights on how we should utilize this technology, how companies can survive and grow, what investors should pay attention to, and how to usher in a new era beyond technology.
So far, the AI ​​chapter's protagonists have been Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis, but who will take the lead in the future remains uncertain. The future of AI and humanity is a work in progress.