NDAs, AI Gold Rush, and Living in Brazil

The Call

West Coast number. Recognizable domain in the caller ID.

"We've been following your work. Want to talk?"

If you're a sci-fi nerd who grew up on cyberpunk comics and dystopian future fiction, this is the call. The tech overlords noticed. They have projects. They need people who understand the weird intersection of AI, culture, and building things.

You sign the NDA before the second meeting.

The NDA Theater

Signed the NDA. Twelve pages. Standard boilerplate plus AI-specific clauses.

Covers:

• Product roadmaps
• Model architectures
• Training data sources
• Internal tooling
• Company strategy
• Slack discussions
• Meeting notes
• Basically everything

What you can say:

• "I work with AI companies"
• "It's interesting"
• [End of list]

What you can't say:

• Literally everything interesting

Here's the reality nobody mentions:

They give this same NDA to thousands of contractors. Company's two years old. Maybe three.

Those contractors:

• Post on Blind (anonymized company complaints)
• Talk on Discord servers
• Share on private Slack channels
• Write Medium articles "inspired by experiences"
• Give conference talks about "techniques I've seen"

The NDA is theater.

Not useless—they'll enforce if you directly leak product details. But thousands of people sign it. Information flows anyway. Just indirectly.

What actually stays secret:

• Specific model architectures (maybe)
• Exact training data sources (sometimes)
• Near-term product launches (until someone leaks to TechCrunch)

What leaks immediately:

• How chaotic it actually is
• What the culture is really like
• Which teams are disasters
• What's actually being built (vaguely)
• Who's getting fired
• What the real priorities are

Company wisdom: "If a thousand people know, it's not a secret—it's just not officially confirmed."

This article: Threaded between what's actually enforceable and what everyone already knows from Blind posts.

What It's Actually Like

The appeal:

• Brilliant people (legitimately smartest folks you'll meet)
• Cutting-edge tech (you're building future sci-fi)
• Resources (compute budget that would make universities weep)
• Mission (maybe change everything, maybe destroy everything, definitely something)

The reality:

• Seven-foot bonghits called sprints
• Ship faster than you can think
• Five projects, all urgent, choose two to fail at
• Everything changes every Thursday standup
• Information firehose set to "drown"

Survival mode: Become automaton. Process everything. Sleep optional. Sanity negotiable.

You either adapt to machine speed or wash out in three months.

The Brazil Problem

Not Brazil the country. Brazil the movie. Terry Gilliam's bureaucratic nightmare where everything works and nothing makes sense.

You're living in a sci-fi future:

• AI that actually works
• Models that pass Turing tests
• Technology that looked impossible five years ago
• Brilliant people solving hard problems

Inside a corporate structure:

• Meetings about meetings
• Slack channels that spawn sub-channels
• Documentation that's outdated before it's written
• Process optimization processes
• Agile sprints that feel more like marathons

The contradiction: Building revolutionary technology using conventional corporate systems designed for widget manufacturing.

What You Learn

Technical skills: Prompt engineering at scale. Model evaluation. Safety testing. Production deployment. Failure analysis when models do unexpected shit.

Real skills:

• Absorb information while drowning
• Say yes to right projects, no to career-ending disasters
• Context-switch five times per hour without breaking
• Ship broken code that works well enough
• Iterate faster than you think possible

The actual lesson: Nobody knows what they're doing. These companies are two years old. Best practices don't exist. The people who "invented the field" are making it up as they go.

You're building the plane mid-flight. Engine's on fire. Passengers complaining. Ship anyway.

The Volume Problem

Seven-foot bonghits = sprints.

Not literal. Metaphoric. The volume of information, decisions, iterations packed into two-week cycles.

Monday 9am: Kickoff call. New safety eval framework. Scope: "comprehensive testing protocol." Timeline: two weeks.

Monday 2pm: Slack notification. Previous project needs emergency fixes. Production issue. "Quick patch, shouldn't take long."

Tuesday morning: Original project scope changed. "Actually, can you also include adversarial testing?" Sure. Timeline unchanged.

Wednesday: Emergency meeting. Different team needs your input on prompt injection research. "Just 30 minutes." Turns into three hours.

Thursday: Demo prep for Friday. Realize requirements shifted Tuesday. Rebuild half the framework overnight.

Friday 10am: Demo. Goes well. "Great work, let's expand this to..."

Friday 3pm: Sprint retro. New project assigned. Starts Monday. Previous two projects still ongoing.

The only way to handle it: Jump in. Become the automaton. Learn everything. Process faster. Satisfy the masters.

Or drown in the firehose.

The Masters (Lovable Degenerate Nerds)

Who runs these companies: Comic book nerds who got rich and decided to build Skynet. Sci-fi fans speedrunning cyberpunk futures. Math geniuses who solved problems nobody asked them to solve. Philosophy majors who read too much AI alignment theory and decided "let's build the thing that might kill everyone."

The appeal: They're your people. Weird. Smart. Actually read the same cyberpunk you did.

The reality: Now they have boards. Investors. Regulations. PR teams explaining why their sci-fi project won't destroy civilization (probably).

The contradiction: Hacker ethos with quarterly earnings calls. Underground rebel energy with institutional responsibilities. "Move fast and break things" meets "fiduciary duty to shareholders."

They contain multitudes. Also, they're fucked.

Why I Started These Sites

AI companies: Fast. Brutal. Ship or die. Serve millions. Move markets. Break things.

Ghost, Fiamma, MDRN, PCC, FutureBudz: Slow. Personal. Deliberate. Serve the ones who get it. Build things that matter to me.

The difference: AI companies: velocity at all costs. These sites: depth at human pace.

AI companies: everyone's product. These sites: mine.

You need both. The gold rush teaches you how to survive machine speed. Personal projects teach you why you're doing it.

Or: You only do the gold rush, burn out, forget yourself, become the machine.

Or: You only do personal projects, stagnate, miss the future, stay comfortable and irrelevant.

Both: Break yourself against the machine. Rebuild yourself slowly. Repeat until dead.

The Future Scandal (Probably)

Every tech giant gets its reckoning:

• Microsoft: Antitrust (crushed competitors)
• Google: Privacy (sold your search history)
• Facebook: Cambridge Analytica (democracy manipulation)
• Apple: Sweatshops (suicide nets on factory buildings)
• Amazon: Warehouses (piss bottles, broken workers)

AI companies are next.

Training data scraped without permission. Models trained on copyrighted work. Safety testing faked to ship faster. Alignment researchers ignored because deadlines. Worker exploitation in data labeling sweatshops. Power consumption destroying local grids.

Pick one. Pick all.

The Epstein-style file dump: Probably Slack channels. Internal emails about "acceptable risk." Safety researcher warnings marked "not urgent." Decisions to ship models that failed testing because competitor was ahead.

Some journalist gets the archive. Ten years from now.

Until then: Great place to work. Brilliant people. Important mission. Best resources in the world.

(That's the joke. That's the truth. Same as it ever was.)

Gotta Serve Somebody

Dylan was right. You serve somebody. Always. Choose your masters or they choose you.

Your options:

• Corporate: Serve shareholders quarterly earnings
• Startup: Serve venture capitalists' exit dreams
• Freelance: Serve whoever pays invoices
• Solo: Serve yourself (broke but free)
• AI companies: Serve people building god/Skynet (unclear which)

The AI choice: At least the overlords are interesting. At least you're building sci-fi instead of optimizing ad click-through rates. At least when it all goes wrong, it'll be spectacular.

If they call: Jump in. Learn everything. Absorb the firehose. Work with brilliant broken people building the future. Get trained by degenerates who read too much sci-fi and took it as instruction manual.

Until information overload. Until you can't process another sprint. Until you forget what you were before you became an automaton.

Then: Build your own shit. Remember who you are. Process at human speed.

Cycle repeats. Serve the machine. Serve yourself. Serve the machine. Die eventually.

Living The Future You Read About

Journalist archetype: Bald. Crazy. Chronicles dystopia. Tells truth nobody wants. Fueled by substances and rage. Smarter because broken.

You in AI: Bald (optional). Crazy (occupational hazard). Building dystopia in real-time. Can't tell truth (NDA). Fueled by coffee and panic. Smarter because drowning.

The difference: Journalists observe. You construct. They report. You enable.

You're living in the sci-fi you read as a kid.

Except weirder. The technology works. The social implications nobody considered. The people building it are brilliant and clueless simultaneously.

Bald. Crazy. Smarter from chaos.

Building the future. Might save humanity. Might doom it. Definitely not boring.

What You Can and Can't Say

CAN say:

• AI companies are chaotic (everyone on Blind says it)
• Volume is insane (public complaints)
• People are brilliant (obvious)
• NDAs exist (meaningless when thousands sign them)

CAN'T say:

• Which company (they'll sue)
• Specific products (NDA violation)
• Model architectures (proprietary)
• Training data sources (competitive)

What leaks anyway: Everything that matters. Blind posts. Discord channels. Medium articles "inspired by my experiences at a major AI company." Conference talks about "techniques I've encountered."

This article: Says what everyone already knows from contractor forums. Doesn't name companies. Doesn't reveal actual secrets. Stays legal.

The tightrope: Tell truth without getting sued. Show reality without burning bridges.

Easy when the NDA is theater and a thousand people already leaked it.

Why It's Worth It

You learn things that don't exist in textbooks. Field's being invented. You're learning from people writing the papers, not reading them.

You see models before public release. Play with capabilities that don't exist yet. Understand what's coming before the world knows.

Resources are insane. Compute budgets that cost millions. Tools that don't exist elsewhere. Access to infrastructure universities dream about.

The people: Half brilliant nerds who read too much sci-fi and decided to build it. Half regular engineers who somehow ended up building god. All of them convinced they're the smart half.

The work might matter. Might change everything. Might destroy everything. Might be remembered as the moment humanity peaked or the beginning of the end. Definitely not boring.

The pressure makes you sharper. Velocity forces evolution. Volume builds capacity. Chaos teaches adaptability. You become capable of things you couldn't do before.

Or: You burn out in three months and go back to normal software engineering where you ship twice a year and nobody's trying to build god.

Both outcomes valid.

The Balance

AI companies: Fast. Brutal. High-volume. Ship or die. Learn everything or drown.

Personal projects: Slow. Deliberate. Human-paced. Build what you want. Stay sane.

Need both:

• Only AI work = burn out, lose yourself
• Only personal projects = stagnate, miss the future

AI work: Teaches velocity, scale, working under pressure. Breaks you. Personal work: Teaches depth, meaning, building for yourself. Fixes you.

Cycle between them. Use AI companies to level up. Use personal projects to remember who you are.

Ghost Says...

Worked with major AI companies. Can't name them. NDA signed. Theater, but legally binding theater.

The people: Comic book nerds who got rich building the future they read about. Philosophy majors accidentally constructing AGI. Math geniuses who thought "let's teach computers to think" sounded fun. Some brilliant. Some lucky. All convinced they're saving/destroying the world.

The work: Seven-foot bonghits called sprints. Information firehose at max pressure. Ship faster than you can think. Become automaton or wash out.

The reality: Nobody knows what they're doing. Companies are two years old. Field's being invented. Best practices don't exist. Figure it out mid-flight while the engine's on fire.

The scandal: Coming. Every tech giant gets one. AI companies will have theirs. Training data theft. Safety testing faked. Alignment ignored. Workers exploited. Pick one.

But they're great otherwise. (Joke. Truth. Both.)

Why Ghost, Fiamma, MDRN, PCC, FutureBudz exist:

Need to move slow. Need to build things I control. Need human-paced evolution. Need sanity preservation.

AI companies teach velocity. Personal projects keep you human.

If they call again: Answer. Sign NDA. Jump in firehose. Learn everything. Build with brilliant degenerates.

Until information overload hits.

Then back here. Slow. Personal. Deliberate. Underground exactness at human velocity.

Gotta serve somebody. Dylan was right.

Might as well serve the sci-fi future while it's being built. Could be worse. Could be optimizing ad impressions.

Bald. Crazy. Smarter from the chaos.

Living the future we read about. Terry Gilliam's Brazil with better tech. The dystopia is weird and we're building it.

Worth it.

---

Note: No companies named. No secrets leaked. NDA legally respected. Truth told anyway.

If you're in AI: You know. You've posted on Blind. You're living it.

If you're not: Now you know. This is what signing the NDA looks like.

Welcome to the gold rush. Information firehose. Brilliant chaos. Future dystopia.

Bring coffee. You'll need it.