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The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau

A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.

Karen Hao

Will AI produce broad-based societal benefit for all? Or return us to an age of empire? The path forward is in our hands.

Author, Empire of AI | Lead Designer of The Pulitzer Center's AI Spotlight Series

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Why We Need To Democratise How We Build AI (11:20)

Lavin Exclusive Speaker

AI is upending the planet in real time, and its path of unchecked development threatens to erode democracy and return us to an age of empire, where a small group of companies dictates our future. It doesn’t have to be this way, says Karen Hao, a Silicon Valley engineer-turned-award-winning-journalist. Karen’s epic and urgent new book Empire of AI—called a “heroic work” by Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)—is the culmination of her years of insider access to OpenAI and her original reporting, spanning five continents. In captivating keynotes, packed with hard-won insights, she assembles the fullest picture yet of the most consequential tech arms race in history. She shows us just how thoroughly AI will alter society, and, more importantly, what role we can all play in actively shaping AI, so that it benefits everyone.

“Our lives are about to be remade by artificial intelligence. If you ever wondered whether all of this is inevitable, whether we could save a little bit of our democracy in the age of AI, then read this book!”—Daron Acemoglu, Winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences

Called “one of the foremost tech journalists covering AI” by Dr. Joy Buolamwini, Karen Hao writes for publications like The Atlantic and leads the Pulitzer Center’s AI Spotlight Series, which trains journalists around the world on how to cover artificial intelligence. In Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin Press, 2025), Karen, the first journalist to ever profile OpenAI, tells the behind-the-scenes story of how a cadre of the most powerful companies in human history is reshaping the world in its image. It’s a page-turning thriller, an “essential work of public education” (Zuboff), and a revelatory portrait of the people controlling this technology. It is the jaw-dropping story of ambition and ego, hype and speculation, plunder and destruction, politics and labor, and, of course, money and power—a brilliant and deeply necessary look at the industry defining our era, and what the future holds.

Karen was formerly a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covering American and Chinese tech companies, and a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. Her work has been cited by Congress, featured in university curriculums, and remade into museum exhibits. She has won numerous accolades, including an American Humanist Media Award and a National Magazine Award for Journalists Under 30. Karen also sits on the AI advisory board of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Prior to journalism, she was an application engineer at the first startup to spin out of Google, and she received a B.S. in mechanical engineering and minor in energy studies from MIT.

Lavin Exclusive Speakers

Angela Duckworth

Author of Grit, the #1 New York Times Bestseller | Pioneering Researcher on Grit, Perseverance, and the Science of Success

Daron Acemoglu

2024 Nobel Prize Winner | 3rd Most Cited Economist in the World | MIT Institute Professor | Bestselling Co-Author of Why Nations Fail and Power and Progress

Alison Wood Brooks

Harvard Business School Behavioral Science Professor | "40 Under 40 MBA Professor" | Author of TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves

Derek Thompson

#1 New York Times Bestselling Co-Author of Abundance | Host of thePlain English Podcast | Staff Writer at The Atlantic

Clint Smith

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author of How the Word Is Passed and Above Ground | The Atlantic Staff Writer

Speech Topics

ChatGPT and Generative AI

Empire of AIHow Silicon Valley is Reshaping the World

In this time of technological and political upheaval, we must re-evaluate the way that we talk about and embrace AI—especially generative models like ChatGPT, and Artificial General Intelligence. Many of the ways that society could benefit from AI—better education and healthcare, a faster transition to renewables, clean air and clean water—have nothing to do with AI models today; they are based on the machine-learning models that have come before. But Silicon Valley, with OpenAI at its helm, has woven a remarkably compelling narrative about generative AI and Artificial General Intelligence being the key to progress and abundance. This narrative cloaks what’s happening beneath the surface, says Karen Hao. In this timely talk, drawing on years of original research, she examines a growing body of evidence to ask whether AI will ever produce broad-based economic benefit. Companies like OpenAI have become empires in the full sense of the word, consolidating extraordinary power and wealth in the hands of the few. In this historic moment, she shows us, the threat of the empires of AI grows clearer by the day. A return to empire is the unraveling of democracy. But there is another viable path. Karen offers an ultimately realistic and hopeful look at how to wrestle back what we’ve already lost, in order to create a world we all want.