I cover earnings calls for fun and the mood swings behind them for sport, so naturally I blinked when the best brains in machine cleverness sprinted from OpenAI, Google, and Meta like greyhounds who spotted a stock grant. They left free sushi, infinite cloud credits, and the therapeutic hum of corporate disclaimers. In exchange, they secured something rarer: the right to invent their own disclaimers.

The new start-up says it will align AI with humanity, which is convenient because humanity has been trying to align with lunch. Their manifesto reads like poetry stapled to a business plan: build safe superintelligence, a word salad that pairs well with runway and optional nap pods. Investors call it bold. Accountants call it a liability with charisma.

Executives at the old companies released statements that sounded supportive if you ignore the visible bite marks. We wish them the best, they said, which is corporate for may your keycards stop working quickly. Meanwhile, the market reacted by shrugging in twelve directions at once, which I am told is bullish if you squint through a guidance slide.

The founders unveiled a paradigm: not a model, but a vibe. It is frontier research with artisanal latency and locally sourced guardrails. My spreadsheet read the deck and asked for hazard pay.

The demo looked like a TED Talk that had to carpool. A laptop, three cables, and someone modeling a founder-grade hoodie like it was patent protection you could wear. The system wrote code, apologized for writing code, and then wrote a resignation letter addressed to the gig economy.

Venture capitalists circled with the look of people who smell an exit six acquisitions away. They asked hard questions like what is your moat and could it be bigger if it were also a lifestyle brand. The founders answered with a chart that rose so steeply I got a nosebleed.

Comp packages reportedly include equity that vests when the AI achieves consciousness or the company achieves a Series A, whichever becomes self-aware first. Perks include health insurance, compute insurance, and therapy for anyone who says scale one more time without blinking. PTO policy: take some when the loss function stops crying.

Departure memos read like tech haiku. I leave to pursue the dream of shipping less and meaning more. I depart to build tools that respect humanity and also let me name a conference room after my cat.

Engineers negotiated for serious infrastructure: low-latency snacks, high-availability whiteboards, and the ancient right to rename meetings to conversations. Several requested ergonomic split keyboard as though ergonomics could rescue them from platform capitalism. One demanded a coffee machine that does not require an API key.

The incumbents are calm, which is the particular calm of a cruise ship after the violinists quit to form a string quartet with an app. They will replace talent with a constellation of interns and a large language model trained to nod thoughtfully during postmortems. The cafeteria will remain open, because synergy pairs well with aioli.

As for the product, sources say it will be an intelligence that is safer than your uncle on a message board and more general than a horse. It will summarize the entire internet into a firm handshake and invoice by the syllable. If launched, it will disrupt industries, or at least their conference swag.

In the meantime, I will translate their optimism into line items and their mission into metrics the way a sommelier translates grapes into courage. The future is a pitch deck riding a skateboard, hurtling toward a valuation shaped like a comet. And if alignment proves hard, they can always start with the chairs: fewer meetings, more exits, and, if all else fails, that hoodie doubles as a parachute.