12-hour days, no weekends: the anxiety driving AI’s brutal work culture is a warning for all of us

San Francisco’s AI startups are pushing workers to grind endlessly, hinting at pressures soon hitting other sectors Not long after the terms “996” and “grindcore” entered the popular lexicon, people started telling me stories about what was happening at startups in San Francisco, ground zero for the artificial intelligence economy. There was the one about the founder who hadn’t taken a weekend off in more than six months. The woman who joked that she’d given up her social life to work at a prest