Scathing 1/5 review pans Karen Hao's Empire of AI, recommends Ananthaswamy instead
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-09-28
A widely shared review gives Karen Hao's Empire of AI a 1/5, arguing the author can't genuinely grasp the technical world she covers and fills the book with human-interest stories. The reviewer's key example: the book highlights Timnit Gebru's experiences but omits her attempt to cancel Yann LeCun over his claim that ML bias comes from training data rather than being built by white men — an exchange that undercuts the book's narrative, so both appear in the index while the clash is left out. Anil Ananthaswamy's Why Machines Learn is recommended as a better general-interest AI history.
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