Victor Leetum is a tech billionaire with a plan: “Cloning himself with AI so he can live forever and take over the world.”
He’ll do anything to achieve his goal, from exploiting cops to hiring mercenaries and downing planes. That is, if we’re to believe William Swain, the narrator of Business Insider founder Henry Blodget’s new page-turner, “The Upgrade.”
That might sound familiar. Executives are creating AI twins of themselves. They’re seeking the fountain of youth via peptides, plasma infusions, and biohacking. There’s also a swirling doomerism around AI, one that shrouds its leaders in conspiracy theories. Don’t ask your tinfoil-hat-uncle about Peter Thiel.
Blodget made his name during the dot-com era, when stocks soared and wallets fattened on the internet’s growth. “This is incredibly similar, except it basically has another three zeroes at the end,” Blodget told me. “The numbers are astounding.”
His book is a way of reckoning with all that money and pessimism. While CEOs get rich, they also extol the risks that AI could pose: the wipeout of the workforce, the elimination of truth, the destruction of humanity. Those early equity holders are also the ones warning of a “permanent underclass.”
“The risks are big,” Blodget said, “which, in fiction, gives you a nice canvas to work with.”
Blodget says he wanted to write the book himself — but allowed Claude to give feedback
“The Upgrade” follows Swain, a millionaire ex-CEO who grew up with and later competed against the more deep-pocketed Leetum. He knows Leetum’s sinister intentions: to make AI superbeings, himself chief among them, and rule humanity. Swain must stop Leetum’s plan and convince the cops he’s not the true villain.
Blodget is an analyst and journalist at heart, spending years on Wall Street before founding this publication. Blodget stepped down as CEO of Business Insider in 2023, and left its board in 2024.
He once pursued an MA in fiction at New York University, he said, and published a short story 20 years ago. This moment, Blodget thought, calls for the form. There’s a “depth of life” that’s difficult to access in tech non-fiction, Blodget said, and life is exactly what writing needs in the AI era.
Early in his writing process, Blodget said a friend called him an “idiot” for not writing the novel with AI.
“I have no doubt that Claude, ChatGPT, and others are going to write really good books at some point,” he said. “For me, I actually wanted to write it. The point was to do it.”
He still used AI in the editing process. He shortened an early hospital scene after Claude said it was getting boring. He also asked Claude to “fact-check” the book, ensuring that he didn’t contradict himself.
Some of Claude’s feedback was “suckup-y” or misremembered plot points, he said. Still, Blodget has no shame in his AI use — even while writing about how AI could ruin the world.
“It takes a human seven hours to read a book,” Blodget said. “To have it done in 17 seconds is astonishing.”
The book’s cover is emblazoned with a review from Claude: “Unforgettable.”
Henry Blodget
AI twins and data centers
Some things in “The Upgrade” are purely fictionalized. Blodget added a new element to the periodic table, after all. Others are painstakingly realistic, he said, like long descriptions of data centers or definitions of consciousness.
Then there’s the in-between — realistic, but not yet feasible. Swain lost his daughter, Loon, before the book’s start. When Leetum produces a hyperrealistic AI version of her, Swain spends much of the novel trying to save his digital daughter from a second death.
“We already have pretty sophisticated AI twins,” Blodget said. “No one is thinking, ‘Hey, it’s a conscious entity,’ but that’s not a far leap.”
Many of us are living in this in-between world. Tech leaders make big promises about a coming AI onslaught, telling us to prepare for the world we haven’t yet seen. It’s helped cement AI’s status as deeply unpopular. Graduates are booing references to AI at their commencement ceremonies, and Americans would rather live near a nuclear reactor than a data center.
“There is a visceral wave of animosity toward AI right now,” Blodget said. He finds the job apocalypse claims to be unfounded, but said that the general pessimism was “totally understandable.”
So, how should we read a novel about AI supervillains in the age of AI hate? It’s not a doomer novel, Blodget said. He pointed to the novel’s happy ending and the unexpected connection with Swain’s AI daughter.
“There also is a very optimistic piece of AI here,” he said.
But there’s a reason Blodget released “The Upgrade” first, rather than its prequel, a space-race novel about Swain’s origins that’s sitting on the shelf. This one speaks to the moment.
“It’s both this tremendously, potentially scary and dangerous thing, and something that can be miraculous,” Blodget said. “We don’t really know yet where we end up on that.”
