The recruitment website is jazzy, awash with pictures of happy young workers, and festooned with upbeat mini-slogans such as insane speed, infinite curiosity and customer obsession. Read a bit lower, and there are promises of perks galore: competitive compensation, free meals, free gym membership, free health and dental care and so on. But then comes the catch. Each job ad contains a warning: Please don't join if you're not excited about working ~70 hrs/week in person with some of the most ambitious people in NYC. The website belongs to Rilla, a New York-based tech business which sells AI-based systems that allow employers to monitor sales representatives when they are out and about, interacting with clients. The company has become something of a poster child for a fast-paced workplace culture known as 996, also sometimes referred to as hustle culture or grindcore.

Not long into his new documentary, Oobah Butler tells the cofounder of his newly minted company, Drops, that they should create a piece of luxury luggage that "looks like a bomb" and will sell for $200,000. Immediately, I'm thinking his quest to get £1 million in 90 days might have come to an early end. Butler is a British prankster documentarian who is known for his stunts, like managing to get Amazon to sell its drivers' urine as energy drinks or creating a fake restaurant called the Shed and gaming TripAdvisor to make it the top-rated London restaurant on the platform. His latest documentary, made for the UK's Channel 4, is called How I Made £1 Million in 90 Days Set in London and New York, it takes on the worlds of startups, venture capital, crypto, and what ultimately comes across as a lot of bullshitting, in the name of striking it rich quick. Butler opens the film by saying, as someone who didn't grow up with money and isn't particularly motivated by it, he's fascinated by the fact that people "idolize" wealthy entrepreneurs.

The tech industry is all-in on AI. Tech giants are pumping massive resources into research and new products. Microsoft and Google are suggesting they'll revamp their entire product lines. AI start-ups have collectively raised tens of billions of dollars in the past year, during a tech slowdown. The buzz has broken Silicon Valley containment, as regular people have had the chance to interact with new and surprising tools.