Inside the AI Industrial Complex

The same systems marketed as the future of human flourishing are being financed, trained and deployed in ways most of the people building them never see whole. Four people who have seen enough of the inside to describe it: an engineer who built model training at Meta and Anthropic and left, a founder of the Google team behind Android's blue dot, an AI ethics advisor to the G20, the UN and the World Bank, and the chair of the UK youth delegation to COP30.

Who this is for

Engineers, investors, policymakers, and anyone whose paycheck comes from this industry.

On the table

• Who actually decides what a frontier model is for?
• Where do the compute, the water, the labor and the data come from, and who is never asked?
• Is refusing to build on that ground a moral stance or just a career exit?

You'll leave with

• A working picture of how the industry is financed, trained and deployed, from people who did it
• What a community of technologists whose hands cannot be hired to certain work looks like in practice
• What you can still change from inside it