Chapter 223: AI Super-God: In Front of the Boss, I'm Like a

February 12th, the day before the start of the semester at the Virtual Academy.

Returning students dragging suitcases walked along Xuelin Road; the early spring wind rustled the parasol tree leaves, and the early cherry blossoms by Pearl Lake bloomed so densely they looked, from afar, like a sheet of crimson cloud.

A silver Bentley rolled slowly out from the direction of the faculty apartments, passed the sports field and the library, and finally headed off toward the east gate.

"Isn't that Chen Yansen, our senior?"

"Drop the 'isn't that' — besides the president and the deans, the only person on campus who can drive a private car in is him."

"Right, I heard Sister Chengzi's tech company is recruiting voice data annotators, ten yuan an hour — too bad I only passed the Putonghua level 2-B test, not the 2-A requirement."

"Are there many openings? I've got a Putonghua level 1-B certificate, I'd like to give it a try."

"Buddy, who said you absolutely need level 2-A? As long as your ability to transcribe dialects is strong enough, you can get hired just the same."

Five or six students watched the Bentley's retreating rear and started chattering away.

Just then, a freshman squeezed over and asked curiously, "Senior, sorry to bother you — where do I sign up? I'd like to find a part-time job too."

"Sister Chengzi's tech company official site. First go into your profile and fill in your Virtual Academy student ID number, then you'll see the sign-up section," one of them answered.

"Thanks, senior!" the freshman kept thanking him.

Before Chen Yansen came to the Virtual Academy, most students' only part-time options were library assistant or cafeteria cleaner — the pay wasn't high, and the competition was brutally fierce.

Usually, in the very first week of freshman registration, every opening was already snapped up.

Those left over could only work as internet café attendants, deliver clothes for the laundromat, or hand out flyers downtown — usually only 30 to 40 yuan a day, and they'd be worked half to death.

But ever since Sister Chengzi's tech company and Pinbei came along, any college student wanting to earn some pocket money could at the very least land an online customer-service gig — sitting in an office with the air-conditioning on, free fruit, snacks and tea every day, and a hundred yuan landing in their account without breaking a sweat.

Precisely because of this, Chen Yansen living on campus stayed pretty undisturbed.

For one, many people wanted to work at Sister Chengzi's tech company or the Shangcheng platform after graduation, and Chen Yansen was their future boss — no one dared bother him casually; for another, people often ran into him around campus, and once you've seen someone enough times, the novelty wears off.

Meanwhile.

Chen Yansen arrived at Zhuxianzhuang Tech Park, parked the car, and stepped into Building 9.

"Good morning, boss!" the tall, youthful, pretty front-desk girl called out sweetly.

Chen Yansen gave a slight nod and walked toward the elevator.

"Morning, boss!" Zhou Chuangxi was standing in the elevator and had just reached for the door-close button when he saw the big boss walking straight toward him, so he hurriedly held the door-open button again.

"Morning, Old Zhou! By the way, has iFlytek's voice database been synced in?"

Chen Yansen replied with a sound and asked casually.

Before Yuxi could officially launch, it had to collect massive amounts of voice data, combine precise manual annotation with deep-learning algorithms, and only then could more advanced acoustic and language models be developed.

Which would in turn boost Yuxi's voice-recognition accuracy!

Generally speaking, there are four common ways to obtain voice data: first, user-authorized collection; second, professional recording collection, mainly on a paid basis;

third, freely available public voice data, covering multiple languages, dialects and different speech scenarios; fourth, data sharing.

Chen Yansen chose the fourth route — with Tao Jingwen playing matchmaker, Sister Chengzi's tech company partnered with iFlytek, and voice data generated by Sister Chengzi phone users using voice functions would be shared between the two sides.

Sister Chengzi's tech company saved a great deal of money and time, and iFlytek got to enrich its own voice database in the process.

"Boss, it's already done, but about 30% of the voice data hasn't been manually annotated yet, so it can only count as raw data."

Zhou Chuangxi gave an awkward laugh and answered quickly.

He'd only been on the job two weeks, but he was already used to how Chen Yansen addressed people.

As a top student from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology's gifted-youth program and a PhD in electrical engineering from UIUC, his main expertise was in computer vision, image processing and voice-recognition technology.

In his view, Chen Yansen calling him Old Zhou actually added a touch of warmth.

Back then, the two of them had only chatted briefly for half an hour over a video interview, and Zhou Chuangxi had made up his mind on the spot to come back to China and join Sister Chengzi's tech company to build an AI voice large-model software.

"HR is helping you recruit data annotators, and next week Microsoft's Daniel Povey will also be joining. The AI lab at Sister Chengzi's tech company is in you two's hands now — I hope to see the product go live soon."

Chen Yansen said, patting Zhou Chuangxi on the shoulder.

One was twenty, the other thirty-one, yet this UIUC PhD in electrical engineering behaved in front of Chen Yansen like a humble student.

The core reason: on the one hand, Chen Yansen paid too much — a monthly salary of 100,000 yuan, plus 100,000 stock options in Sister Chengzi's tech company, vested over four years, with extra equity rewards if he produced results along the way, working out to over four million yuan a year.

On the other hand, when he learned that Yuxi's entire system framework had been independently written by Chen Yansen, he was stunned, and after examining the code, he felt a genuine sense of admiration for his new boss.

He knew perfectly well that, with Chen Yansen's level of computer programming, even in the United States he'd be a super-god of the AI voice-recognition field.

So Zhou Chuangxi used the excuse of work to find spare moments to discuss voice-model optimization directions with Chen Yansen.

Those days actually reminded him of his time studying at UIUC.

"Daniel Povey?" Zhou Chuangxi repeated the new colleague's name instinctively.

"You know him?" Chen Yansen said, surprised.

At this point in time, Daniel didn't have much of a name in the AI world — the Kaldi voice-recognition toolkit he was in charge of developing was still in its early stages, and his most impressive title was merely senior engineer at Microsoft Research.

"He gave a public lecture at UIUC, and he left a deep impression on me — the man has very high attainments in voice-recognition technology."

Zhou Chuangxi praised him without holding back.

"That's right, it's definitely him!" Chen Yansen said with a smile.

"Boss, isn't he a professor at Johns Hopkins?" Zhou Chuangxi asked, puzzled.

"I told him that the AI lab at Sister Chengzi's tech company would be building a petabyte-scale storage and a compute cluster of 600 GPUs, which would give a total computing power of 15 petaflops."

Chen Yansen shrugged and laid out honestly the main reason Daniel was willing to join Sister Chengzi's tech company.

15 petaflops means 150 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

Of course, it also had something to do with his almost 'succubus'-like superhuman mental power—in just a few sentences on the phone, he secured a top R&D engineer from the future AI world.

Seven years later, Facebook offered him the position of chief scientist and an annual salary of a million US dollars, and he turned it down flat.

And Chen Yansen only offered him a monthly salary of 22,000 US dollars, and Daniel happily agreed in a flash.

The 15-petaflops server was just too tempting!

After all, back then the total computing power of the voice-processing center at Johns Hopkins barely scraped 0.5 petaflops.

"Boss, are you serious?" Zhou Chuangxi swallowed hard and confirmed in disbelief.

"What's there that's real or fake about it? I had someone run the numbers—the cost is only 300 million."

Chen Yansen smiled and shook his head, saying it was nothing.

"Ding—" The elevator doors slowly slid open!

Zhou Chuangxi hurried after him: "Boss, this is 15 petaflops of computing power. Even the Lighthouse Nation's Titan supercomputer only has 17.6 petaflops."

Chen Yansen gave a faint smile.

In his heart he let out a quiet sigh, marveling at how rapidly computing power was iterating.

Thirteen years later, Nvidia released an AI supercomputer called Project DIGITS, capable of delivering 1 petaflop of floating-point operations per second, priced at only 21,999 yuan.

But back in 2012, to build a server with equivalent computing power—setting aside electricity and maintenance costs—the hardware procurement alone would run close to 30 million yuan.

Zhou Chuangxi's eyes went wide, his mouth fell slightly open, and at last he understood why that British bloke Daniel was willing to come to Huaguo.

A server with 15 petaflops of computing power alone was enough to draw in a flood of computer science PhDs from Ivy League and Tsinghua–Peking caliber schools.

In the Lighthouse Nation, labs with super-high computing power weren't actually rare, but given Zhou Chuangxi and Daniel's industry influence, even if they got in, at best they'd be stepping stones for others—nowhere near as comfortable as joining Sister Chengzi Tech and taking full charge of a project.

"Old Zhou, the hardware needed to build the computing server can arrive this week. You pick the server room location. Also, Telecom has set up a 4G experience point in the tech park, so don't worry about the network."

Chen Yansen added one more line before stepping into his office.

"Got it, Boss. I'll get back to work then." Zhou Chuangxi, smiling, walked cheerfully back to his workstation.

As he walked, he marveled at Chen Yansen's local clout.

After all, this was 2012—the three major carriers hadn't even gotten their 4G licenses, yet Sister Chengzi Tech could enjoy 4G service ahead of time.

Chen Yansen pushed the door open, dropped into the plush chair, and casually turned on the computer.

Compared with Sweden, Norway, Korea, and the Lighthouse Nation, domestic 4G networks in the commercial space were still in the exploratory and build-out phase.

He first checked the business updates of Pin Bei, Sister Chengzi Tech, Kuai Pao, and Yun Su, and only after seeing nothing amiss did he leisurely scroll through the news.

"February 11—Hangcheng's citizens gain access to the nation's first 4G experience point, with average download speeds reaching 30 Mbps…"

Chen Yansen snorted a laugh—Huaguo's first 4G site was clearly at Zhuxianzhuang Tech Park.

But this thing had been specially approved for him by Xu Zhenhui and Zhao Maolin together—usable, but not to be spoken of.

"VIP. com filed an IPO application with the Lighthouse Nation Securities Association yesterday, expecting to raise 125 million USD."

"The Thousand-Group War heats up! Lashou, Nuomi, and Meituan form a three-way standoff, while Dianping, Wowo Tuan, and QQ Tuan give chase relentlessly!"

"Walmart announces increase of its stake in Yihaodian to 51%, formally taking control of Yihaodian!"

"Ma Liyun and Wang Jianlin strike a 100-million wager: can e-commerce claim 50% of the retail market?"

"The food-delivery war erupts! Hungry? can't hold off the invading dragon—only 60% of the Hucheng market remains!"

Chen Yansen gave the headlines a casual glance, feeling only that the internet environment of 2012 was far more nourishing than a decade-plus later.

A pile of vertical e-commerce sites he'd never even heard of could, at the drop of a hat, raise tens of millions in funding.

This truly was an era of revelry for entrepreneurs!

So long as you dared to dream, so long as you could talk a good game, VCs really would pony up the cash!

Take Zhang Yiming's ByteDance, for instance—not even a single stroke of the eight characters had been written, yet with nothing but a PPT, it secured five million in funding.

At the same time.

Mama Ali was busy upgrading its B2C business and using Zhifu Bao to continually expand payment scenarios;

Qiandu was busy optimizing its search engine algorithms and began experimenting with adding nearby merchant recommendations and dining/entertainment options inside Qiandu Maps to drive traffic to group-buy sites, thereby earning ad revenue and commissions;

Penguin was busy ramping up WeChat promotion, locked in a love-hate battle with its own QQ, while simultaneously announcing that total users had broken past 100 million!

Chen Yansen, meanwhile, quietly poached two top AI technical experts from the Lighthouse Nation and kicked off the R&D path for a voice large model.

(End of chapter)