The Cult of Nightingale; Secrets in London’s Silicon Scene
UPDATE: I’ve decided not to pursue this story any further. I’m deleting my previous articles and leaving this as my final word on the matter. There are huge questions left on the table, but I can no longer find answers without jeopardising my safety. Nanomax have already taken my career and integrity, and I’d rather that was the last of it.
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From the moment Fiona Nightingale first burst onto the tech scene, Nanomax has been synonymous with artificial intelligence. You can’t have a conversation about AI without talking about the company or its charismatic vision-holder.
Underneath all the techno-glitz and misty-eyed future-talk, however, something isn’t quite right.
For the best part of a year, I’ve been speaking to employees — past and present — of Nanomax Technology to get a better picture of the company, and to understand some of the troubling accusations surrounding it.
Take, for example, the high staff turnover and slew of twenty-six firings over two years. Twenty six individuals who were fired on account of ‘breaking their NDAs’. I’ve reached out to nearly all of these people, incidentally, and not one was happy to go on the record and elaborate. Anonymous sources still at Nanomax tell me that “speaking out against [Nanomax] is a fast-track to financial ruin, jail-time or worse”.
Or how about the abrupt change in messaging surrounding the development of Nanomax’s feverishly-anticipated Acolytes? Nightingale would frequently wheel out her now iconic ‘there’s nothing artificial about our artificial intelligence’ line, and was proud to talk about the company’s ‘departure from machine learning and traditional AI programming’. Today, however, the company refuses acknowledge these comments, with ‘personality-driven machine learning’ being the new PR line of choice when discussing the proprietary tech powering Acolytes.
Or, perhaps most worrying, the fact that Acolyte’s Lead Engineer — Beatrice Abbot — has been missing for the past seven months. While there’s no immediate connection between her disappearance and anything related to her work, colleagues have certainly connected the dots.
“I don’t know what she might have had on them, but they obviously wanted her quiet.”
While Nightingale might be the face of the Nanomax brand, those in the know regard Abbot as the real brains behind the Acolyte technology, who is credited for the first working prototype of the eagerly anticipated application. Sources at Nanomax say that Abbot and Nightingale had a ‘strained relationship’, but the reasons for this aren’t clear.
My full article on the disappearance of Beatrice Abbot is still being worked on.
None of the above — or the countless other stories I’ve heard about the company’s questionable internal politics — have made a ripple in the media. These are huge stories. And nobody is talking about them. A combination of the company’s PR team and legal representation has kept Nightingale’s halo well polished.
In researching and publishing what I know so far, I’ve opened my own doors to a cascade of vitriol and abuse. Such is the status of Nightingale’s celebrity, that any slights on her, the business or the Acolyte tech are met with a violent and visceral reaction from her fans. To speak out against Nanomax is to paint a big red target on your back, and Nightingale’s cult of followers have good aim.
Until there’s hard, tangible proof of any wrong-doing, the questions and concerns surrounding Nanomax fall on deaf ears. There’s clearly a cover up at play here. The question is: what, exactly, are they covering?
