Inferthermic

The inbox is a firehose, but my engineering team is a wall of concrete. They'll absorb the shock. I have to believe that, because if I start thinking about the fact that I'm responsible for a Fortune 500 company's first-ever LLM deployment, I'll go full existential crisis and start writing poetry in the Jira tickets. Maddy is running ops like a Navy SEAL. She's already got a spreadsheet of every Cencora executive, their birthdays, and their favorite kinds of bagels. "Bribe them with carbs," she tells me, copying me on a DoorDash order for a dozen every Monday. Jian is two steps ahead, as always. He's got a running list of the next companies to target: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Palantir. But I know his real target is farther up the food chain. He wants Anthropic. He wants OpenAI. He wants to run their alignment audits so badly you can see it in the way he sharpens his pencils before every meeting, like he's preparing for war with mechanical graphite. Sometimes I imagine what will happen when we actually land one of those big ones. I see the news headline in my head: "Inferthermic Preempts Next-Gen Bioterror Plot, Saves Chicago." Or maybe it'll just be some minor cyberattack, and we'll get a quiet thank-you from the NSA and a fruit basket from Google. I picture the alternate futures, like that movie with the sliding doors.