The Soviet Medal

I was recently at home going through some old dusty boxes and found this medal you can see on the picture below. Appears like a Soviet medal, and I remembered that when I was in Hungary, Budapest, in 1992 on a study trip with my "gymnasie" class from Birkerød. The Iron Curtain had recently fallen, and it was in fact my first trip to the East - to countries that only a few years before had been inaccessible to us, and in my young mind they still symbolised the Cold War that I had been born into, but had just ended. 

Budapest was lovely, still overcoming the decades of Communism; the country was still trying to find its new identity in a Liberal Western world where they would eventually become a full-fledged member of the EU in 2005. In 1992 the city retained its Soviet looks but with a refreshing atmosphere of expectation and openness to all things new coming from the West. The many beautiful tourist spots of the city had still not learnt to cater to Western tourists, and were largely empty, but with their historical beauty. How different it was from the Budapest I visited again in 2016! 

It was in this context that Soviet souvenirs were being sold on the street: the once so mighty Soviet army had befallen to its soldiers selling off clothes and medals for whatever meager price that Westerners like myself were willing to pay. It was a symbol of a defeated empire and for young people like myself, an opportunity to have a small part of a history that even now is just for the books... 

I bought this medal that I found in an old box of memories that has traveled from country to country for more than 20 years, and with the magic of AI that we have now, I inquired ChatGPT about the medal.  It is in fact not a not a military medal. It is a KOMSOMOL award badge from the 11th Five-Year Plan. 

Formed in 1918 immediately after the revolution, KOMSOMOL was the youth wing of the Communist Party of the USSR; an important organisation that functioned as a training ground for aspiring Communists and promoted the ideology among the young. As part of this propaganda the organisation awarded medals for the most outstanding youth, and this medal was probably awarded to a proud young member, - “A Young Guardsman” -, for having distinguished him- or herself (even Guardsman) in working hard in Soviet productivity, technology or innovation, or even just some outstanding work within the KOMSOMOL.  

The 11th Five-year plan was the USSRs development plan between 1981 and 1985. These plans were typical Communist centralised blueprints, coordinated and implemented but the State Planning Agency GOSPLAN, that aimed to increase production at almost any cost. 

The first plan, between 1928-1932 was prepared under Josef Stalin (1878-1953) with the aim to massively industrialize Soviet society by any means, and it thus led to massive oppression and the death of hundreds of thousands (Despite this, it might have set the USSR in the path to an industrial development that would give it an important fighting chance in WWII).  

By the 1980s the focus on the plans were changing. The Soviet state was already lagging behind the West in terms of productivity and technology, and the focus on the 11th plan was rather to integrate production and renew and replace hardware to make it more efficient. 

After this, there were two more plans: the 12th plan in 1985 was Mikhail Gorbachev's (1931-2022) plan to accelerate industrial production and decentralise power, implementing "perestroyka". By 1989, under deep social and political pressure, the plan had failed to stop the economic decline of the USSR. A new plan, the 13th, was designed, but it barely started to be implemented as the USSR fell apart, and GOSPLAN ceased to exist.  

This is the little memory and story behind this little souvenir from an Empire and a time that no longer exists! According to the AI they are quite common, so probably of little value, some EUR 50, perhaps a bit more for a collector. But in my little world, it has great personal and historical value!

Karen Hao: Empire of AI (2025)

"Empire of AI", by Karen Hao, tell the history of OpenAI, from its creation as a non-profit with the ambition of developing AI for the benefit of humanity, to the profit-making company behind ChatGPT; one of the most powerful actors in AI today. 

Much of the book follows Sam Altman and the people around OpenAI: It describes their disagreements, changing business model and eventually the crisis in 2023, when Altman was fired by the board only to return a few days later. This history is interesting because OpenAI is not just another company: it is influencing how one of the most important technologies of our time is developing. 

I felt that the book at times became too personal (some of the conflicts sound very similar to what can happen in any office…), and some of the biographical material unnecessary for the book’s point (in particular on Mr. Altman’s sister). 

What I found much more interesting though, were the disagreements about what AI actually means and where it may take us. In fact, OpenAI itself was born out of these questions: If more powerful AI can transform society, who should control it? Should development be accelerated because of the enormous benefits it could bring, or slowed because we do not understand the risks? The disagreement between the AI “boomers” and “doomers” runs through much of the history of OpenAI and helps explain many of its internal conflicts. Thus, the best part of the book is when it looks beyond OpenAI itself; for instance when it discusses the enormous data centers needed to develop AI (including their consumption of energy and water, and the human labour behind AI, including workers in developing countries hired to label data and moderate disturbing content). The apparently immaterial world of AI actually depends on very physical infrastructure, resources and human labour, something that is too often lost in the wider discussion on the technology. 

Ms. Hao’s main argument is that there is an emerging “Empire of AI”; a small number of powerful tech companies and individuals concentrating technology, capital and decision-making while exploiting resources, data and labour from across the world, just like any previous capitalist exploitation throughout history. 

I was less convinced about this argument, as I think that it on the one hand ignores the complexity and speed of technological change, as well as simplifying the social dynamics of such change. I got a bit annoyed when she appeared to criticize people at OpenAI for not providing satisfactory answers about the consequences of AI, implying that they were avoiding difficult questions. I rather think there may be  another explanation: they simply do not know the answers! 

And that was indeed the most interesting conclusion I took from the book: The people developing AI are obviously intelligent, ambitious and visionary, but they are all still human beings! As Ms. Hao amply proves, they disagree, make mistakes, fight over office politics and interpret evidence differently, and in fact these people themselves do not really know how quickly it will develop, what its impact will be, what resources it will require, what it will do to employment and inequality, or what role it will eventually have in our societies. 

I therefore think the book could have been much stronger if it had used the history of OpenAI more explicitly as a way to explore these questions. 

Maybe my slightly uncomfortable conclusion from the book is that there appears to be nobody anywhere who fully understand what is happening with AI: Not OpenAI, not academics, not governments, not business... They have different ideas about what might happen, but nobody really knows where AI is going or how quickly we will get there... 

Of course this does not mean that we should panic about AI, nor that we should simply leave its development to tech companies and billionaires. It rather means that we should talk much more seriously about what we want from this technology, what risks we are willing to accept, how its benefits and costs should be distributed, and what role we want it to have in our societies. 

That is also why I would still recommend the book as one more in a canon of AI books; read together with other AI books it shows the very human organisation behind a technology that can otherwise seem almost abstract, and thus the questions we are all struggling with.