Chapter 699: Fate's Approval

But if someone wanted to take it, they could find a way to take it, though Fang Hong wouldn't do that — this is the hard-earned money of over a billion countrymen, and if he took it he'd be done for himself.

Still, with this money, the "Yifei Fairy Residence" research institute could officially set sail.

For equipment, mainly GPUs — order tens of thousands of enterprise-grade GPUs from Nvidia first; right now there are no restrictions on ordering.

They'll be assembled into cluster scale, and still placed in Huailai County.

Nvidia's stock price has been slowly climbing now, with a market cap of over twenty billion US dollars.

Only Fang Hong realized that Artificial Intelligence would need GPUs; not many people had this awareness. Of course, "Yifei Fairy Residence" would also research its own GPUs.

These GPUs wouldn't be for gamers, but for enterprise computing.

As for storage management and network architecture, domestic manufacturers would handle it — child's play.

Then there's the AI Chip business — nobody's really good at it, everyone's only just started in the past two years. This would be listed as a strategic-level research project at "Yifei Fairy Residence."

Two scientists would lead teams — one named Han Song, simultaneously a professor at Tsinghua University and MIT.

Later, the deep compression technology and the so-called efficientml framework were developed by him. Anyway, who knows what that stuff is — he became a famous AI Chip designer later.

The other one is Xie Yuan, a professor at the University of Illinois, who also developed his own architecture — the so-called stacking technology in AI Chips was driven by him.

He won the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award.

Fang Hong didn't even know what these people were researching. His only advantage was knowing which people would be amazing in the future, so he poached them over with high salaries and faith.

Anyway, these people didn't have results yet, they were still in the exploration stage. Although their academic credentials were high, they weren't particularly outstanding yet, so they were easy to poach.

Of course, top researchers' annual salaries were in the tens of millions of dollars range. With Fang Hong's 200 million US dollars, he could only support 20 people.

But not everyone was at the tens-of-millions level — that was only for team leaders, the heads of a research lab.

"Yifei Fairy Residence" would have several research labs, not just researching one thing — AI Chips, natural language, computer vision, robots would each have their own research lab.

And suffering and noble character and all that wouldn't be encouraged here — as long as you had ability and talent, keeping a mistress or two wouldn't be anyone's business.

Moral decay and expulsion was the school's business; here they wouldn't expel anyone, they'd keep using you, not caring about outside public opinion, not bound by morality.

You can't have your cake and eat it too — that won't do. Many amazing scientists don't have particularly noble characters.

Einstein, Newton were all like that — morally rotten to the core.

So personnel is a huge expense, after all, supporting a top-tier team isn't cheap. Then there's data — high-quality data equals gold.

This data can't just be scraped from the internet — it has to be unpolluted, very raw, valuable data.

A lot of data on the internet has been polluted — for example, rumors, like those fake news stories about Liu Tianxian, all processed twice over, not real.

And this data has to be cleaned. Baidu's AI is so dumb precisely because it has a lot of polluted data and can't see the truth.

Also, a lot of data has to be purchased — for example, authorized medical patient privacy data, a single dataset costs 1 million US dollars, and that's unpolluted data.

For example, real-time financial trading data interface fees — annual fees reach tens of millions of US dollars.

There are also tons of literature, medical imaging, news articles, knowledge graphs, academic papers — too much data.

Plus street view images, behavior logs, dialogue corpora — countless data sources. To get the most raw data, you need money, and it's not a small sum.

And the most expensive part of this kind of research is electricity — it's a continuous expense. A single cluster's power consumption costs hundreds of millions of US dollars.

Hardware and software, on the other hand, aren't that expensive.

So only a few countries and companies can afford to play this game. Just the daily electricity costs aren't something ordinary capital can bear.

Many people only pick one category as their research direction. Fang Hong of course grabs everything — he doesn't know which one will spark a revolution, but he'll grab them all first.

Because there's too much talent, arranging them all properly isn't an easy task.

Ten billion dollars — something has to come of it.

Anyway, burn through five years first. As for after five years, maybe the country itself will take over, and Fang Hong will retire a hero, hiding his achievements and fame!

As for HR, he'd be the most badass HR — just find an assistant to optimize personnel.

In early June, the May Day slate films that had been screening for over a month came off theaters one after another.

"Lucy 2" with a slim box office of 1.245 billion defeated "Captain America 3"'s 1.243 billion, becoming the May Day box office champion.

The difference between the two was only about two million in box office, and the media followed up with extensive coverage:

"Satisfying! 'Lucy 2' completely defeats Hollywood Marvel film!"

"Chinese film box office surpasses Hollywood! These 3 changes have Hollywood completely panicking?"

"'Lucy 2' takes box office crown, Liu Tianxian defeats Hollywood blockbuster, domestic films are rising!"

"Domestic film comeback! 'Lucy 2' rakes in box office, crushing Hollywood mega-production!"

Such news was being reported everywhere on the internet for a time, especially self-media outlets blowing it up crazily.

And this had to be hyped — not just for national confidence, but also to tell peers that without Wanda, Jade Rabbit's films can still take a beating.

Not only take a beating, but also go head-to-head with Hollywood films.

Under the ecosystem of Chang'e, Jade Rabbit, and Rabbit Ticket, no single or pair of theater chains could stop them.

"Captain America 3"'s box office was only fierce for the first three days, on the fourth day it got cut in half and then halved again, by the seventh day it was clearly going downhill, and by the tenth day it had hit rock bottom.

Marvel films are all like this — only fresh at first, then they fall off.

But Hollywood films rely on the global market. This film's global total box office took 1.151 billion US dollars — simply terrifying.

How many horror films would you have to make to match what they do with one film? Their licensing and merchandise alone could sell like crazy.

And the production cycle is about the same — roughly completed in about a year.

They really know how to play — one film equals several of yours.

And "Lucy 2"'s international box office was 275 million US dollars, about 1.925 billion.

Such a result is already very good for a Chinese-language film. And currently, among those who can sell over 200 million US dollars at the overseas box office, only Liu Tianxian has done it.

No other star with a Chinese face has her international record.

Adding the domestic market, "Lucy 2"'s global total box office reached 452 million dollars, about the same as the previous life's version.

In the previous life, international box office was high while domestic was low; in this life, Liu Tianxian's film has high domestic and low international.

This was also normal—after all, Liu Tianxian felt more familiar to domestic audiences, with a higher acceptance rate, while internationally her acceptance was relatively lower.

Added to Jade Rabbit's local promotional advantage, a high domestic box office was a normal phenomenon.

And *Lucy 2*'s global box office exceeded 3.1 billion, another film crossing the 3-billion box office mark.

Jade Rabbit could probably get around 800 million from it; the revenue split on overseas export films wasn't as generous as imagined—20% would already be good.

And this money didn't include Wanda's share. Now that cinemas had gone online, settlement took only two or three months, not as long as before; some even settled within a month.

Everything was internet-based now—no longer like the old days.

And Liu Tianxian, riding on *Lucy 2*, smoothly entered the Rabbit Maoyan Hall of Fame, becoming the first Chinese-language actress to cross the 10-billion box office mark.

This was a Hall of Fame specifically established by Rabbit Maoyan—collecting the works of those actors and directors, ranked by box office, publishing introductions and honors on Rabbit Maoyan for people to admire.

Of course, those supporting roles weren't counted in—only leads. It couldn't be like Da Heiniu, who was clearly all supporting roles yet still called himself a ten-billion actor.

That was just too much water. Only counting films where one was the lead—that way it was more authoritative.

Yet Liu Tianxian sat firmly at the top, with second-place Shen Teng trailing far behind.

Now Shen Teng had only acted in three films: *The Mermaid*, *Goodbye Mr. Loser*, and *Dying to Survive*—all blockbusters.

But he was only at the five-billion level; he'd need to keep at it for a few more years. Anyway, Shen Teng was pretty fierce—in his past life he made it to first place, over thirty billion.

This guy was good not just at Variety, but at acting too.

On June 10th, the intellectual property lawsuit between Swan Castle and Panda Entertainment opened in court in Shanghai.

Panda Entertainment was registered in Shanghai, and generally such lawsuits were heard in the defendant's jurisdiction.

The entire livestreaming circle, including film and television content creators, was watching this case closely, because the ruling would affect the advancement of Copyright Law.

If Swan Castle won, they could collect licensing fees from every internet livestreaming platform—anyone streaming their games would have to pay, and not paying would be deemed infringement.

Including peripheral products and content featuring their game content for profit—as long as it was for profit, payment was required.

If it went this way, Swan Castle would essentially be taxing the entire circle, just because their games were too popular.

Of course, if Panda Entertainment won, they could freeload with a clear conscience—freeload however they wanted.

But thinking about it, the chances were slim. The authorities were already pushing for copyright standardization—though it was hard to say for sure.

Xiao Wang, including Lao Wang, was also following this trial, as if awaiting a judgment of fate.

Actually, to anyone with eyes, there was no surprise here. If Swan Castle lost, all the previous copyright efforts would be wasted, and everyone could freeload openly.

Soon the Shanghai Intellectual Property Court ruled: "The continuous dynamic footage of *Hero Glory*, *Honor of Kings*, and *PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds* constitutes cinematographic-like works, with copyright belonging to Swan Castle!"

Panda Entertainment organized streamers to livestream game content and profited from it, infringing Swan Castle's copyright.

Although the livestreaming behavior had a certain degree of originality, it did not depart from the core expression of the game itself and did not constitute fair use; livestreaming games required authorization from the copyright holder, otherwise it constituted infringement.

Panda Entertainment shall compensate Swan Castle 400 million and cease the infringing behavior.

Originally it was 2 billion, directly reduced by four-fifths—but 400 million was still acceptable. Right now Panda Entertainment couldn't even come up with 400 million.

(End of chapter)