Something closer to a religion

Karen Hao opens Empire of AI with two epigraphs. One is a passage from Sam Altman’s blog in 2013. He had heard a saying from Qi Lu: successful people create companies, more successful people create countries, and the most successful people create religions. Altman drew his own conclusion: the most successful founders “are on a mission to create something closer to a religion”, and at some point a company turns out to be the easiest way to do it.

Hao comes back to it in chapter 18, where she argues that OpenAI’s mission works as a formula for empire: it gathers talent, it gathers capital, and it is vague enough to be reinterpreted at will. In chapter 10 she writes that the people who fear AGI and the people who long for it preach from the same bible. For her, the religious quality of the AI labs is the warning sign.

I read the same sentence as a forecast, and an accurate one. A company has always held people together with two things: what it pays them for and what it lets them believe. For most of industrial history the first carried the weight. The work was the reason to show up, the wage was the reason to stay, and the mission statement was decoration. If AI makes a great deal of human work cheaper, the first bond weakens. What is left to hold a group of people together is the second: a shared idea of what they are building and why it matters.

That is not new. Monasteries, guilds, universities, and the early labs of the nuclear age were held together this way, and they built things no wage alone would have bought. The OpenAI that Hao describes runs on the same fuel: people who took less money than Google offered because they believed in the mission, and who threatened to leave together when they thought it was in danger. Altman put a line from Admiral Rickover on the office walls for the same reason (One person can make a difference).

Hao is right that a belief can be bent to serve power, and that a vague mission can be reinterpreted to justify almost anything. That is the risk of every religion. But the answer is to look at what the faith builds and whom it serves, not to wish companies were held together by wages alone. I expect more of them to look like this, not fewer, and I share some of the faith myself: An emergent property of matter.

More on the book in my review, An Empire of People.

References

• Karen Hao, Empire of AI (2025), epigraph, chapter 10, “Gods and Demons”, and chapter 18, “A Formula for Empire”.
• Sam Altman, Successful People, blog post, March 7, 2013.