Chapter 114: Three Major Challenges

Lately, Song Bo Jun was under immense stress. It had been a month since he became the technical director of Xing Hai Technologies”Intelligent Learning Machine’ project, and his stress levels had only been growing ever since. He was a locally renowned AI specialist. He was once the project leader of Baidu’s ‘Intelligent Voice Recognition project’ and aided in the creation of the most intelligent robot in his nation — the ‘Xiao Du’ robot. In the voice recognition field, he believed that he was one of the top experts in the world.

Last month, he left Baidu for Xing Hai Technologies. One of his reasons was that there were too many personnel in Baidu that specialized in AI, and all of them were very experienced and skilled. Song Bo Jun, who was only 36, could merely hold the position of a middle-class technician, as there were still too many above him. He felt that his talents could not be fully unleashed back in Baidu. The second reason was because of Xing Hai Technologies’ human resource manager, Gao Ting Yan. After she consulted her boss, she offered him an eight million annual salary.

Of course, Song Bo Jun would not admit that he job-hopped for the sake of money, but instead claimed it was to satisfy his greater values in life. However, after taking over the ‘Intelligent Learning Machine’ project, he realized that his salary was not going to earn itself easily. He felt stranded in no man’s land. This project was harder than what he thought it would be.

There were three technical challenges presented before him, first being the intelligent voice recognition feature. It demanded a fast yet accurate process to analyze what the user was saying, and the error had to be lower than 0.0001%. This was Song Bo Jun’s area of expertise. The voice recognition program done by his team, under his leadership, was able to keep errors below 0.001%. It was difficult to improve it ten-fold to the targeted benchmark, but definitely not impossible with effort.

Secondly, the smart learning program. This program emulated the human ability to learn independently. From 1+1 in primary school to calculus in university, and from the three laws of motion to much more sophisticated quantum theories, all available knowledge had to be learned and mastered. Similar technologies were used in DeepMind company’s AlphaGo product, but its AI program was only limited to playing Go. It utilized deep learning, artificial neural networks, MTCS (Monte Carlo tree search) technique, and many others to allow the bot to match and train with itself in a wild manner. Within just a few days, the AI became better at Go than professionals. After the AlphaGo was released, it bested Go world champion Li Shi Shi 4:1 and defeated Z nation’s Go prodigy 3:0. Against real people, the AlphaGo rampaged its way to victory, giving humans no chance in the AI-human war.

Now, the program that Xing Hai wanted him to produce was just like the AlphaGo, wildly learning on its own until it mastered all knowledge in the universe, ultimately growing into an ‘All Knowing’ super program. After looking at the demands on the project, Song Bo Jun was left slack-jawed. “This is…preposterous. Go is just a game, it is only limited to one kind of knowledge. But the learning algorithm for this program that Mr. Chen wants is for the AI to learn every obtainable knowledge, which literally means to make it an all-knowing program. Its difficulty is on a whole new level, how is it even doable?”

Chen Jin, on the other hand, did not think the same way. If the AlphaGo’s learning abilities were on a scale of one, then this would be be. When there was one, it would be easy to realize two, and when there was two, there would be access to even the insurmountable. Chen Jin’s concept was parallel with the Taoist thoughts, which said “Dao begets One, One begets Two, Two begets Three, Three begets all things.” When there was one, all would become easy.

Song Bo Jun smiled bitterly. “The AlphaGo has the most advanced smart learning program out there. Although there are similar products made by teams within our country, even they still have a long way to go to be even considered advanced. Here in Xing Hai Technologies, our basics are at rock bottom. I doubt we can directly go from zero to three in your context. I suggest that we should first settle with an AI specialist team and start from one.”

Chen Jin took his advice. He then spent 20 million to acquire the entire personnel of an AI studio named ‘Zenith.’ He did not cancel his original plans for the smart learning program. This program would be the core of the ‘Intelligent Learning Machine’ project, and directly determined its market competitiveness. Therefore, it must be done.

The third challenge was an intelligent video generator. The program for the intelligent video generator was related to the algorithms of the smart learning program. When the user asked a question and the program was able to identify the answers, the intelligent video generator program would put together the associated words, diagrams, and videos, and automatically generate an explanatory video with automated dubbing.

In fact, Song Bo Jun thought that the difficulty to write the algorithms for this program was lower than that of the second assignment. In his knowledge, Ali corporation had already developed a picture generating technique to cope with the high demand for pictures during the double eleven shopping festival. It was capable of generating hundreds of thousands of pictures in a second, thus greatly reducing picture editing efforts.

Generation of a video was much more complex than the generation of pictures, but a video itself was made up of an enormous amount of photos if it were to be broken down into frames. Paired with a dubbing robot, it did not seem to be difficult. As long as he was given ample time, he will be able to realize this feature with his team.

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The intelligent voice recognition was also not an issue. Only the second feature of the project, the “Smart learning program”, got him scratching his head. He had completely no idea and did not even know how to begin.

He even thought of pulling out of the project after realizing his own limits. “It looks like… I’m no expert after all. Mr. Chen did have a great idea, but it’s all on paper with no technical information whatsoever. My head hurts. I should just resign after this month. Let Mr. Chen find someone capable of leading this project. I really don’t have what it takes for this, there might be a few capable ones in our country but definitely not me. I shouldn’t stay, as I’ll only delay its progress.” The thought of resigning emerged from within Song Bo Jun.

That afternoon, just when Song Bo Jun was floating away with his thoughts, Mr. Chen asked someone to call him over. After he came, Mr. Chen pulled out a USB flash drive from his pocket and placed it in front of him.

“What is this for Mr. Chen?” Song Bo Jun asked.

“Technical information for the smart learning program,” said Chen Jin.

“I… is this for real?” Song Bo Jun was doubtful. “Where did you get this from, is it usable? Is it useful? How did you get your hands on this?”

“Of course it is useful, it cost me a fortune to obtain this! And another thing, this flash drive is encrypted, I’ll tell you the password later. After you copy the information, the flash drive will automatically format itself. The copied data can only be copied for one additional time before the read-only lock activates… you must utilize the information inside wisely.” Chen Jin did not mention that the technical information was about 16-gigabytes in size, and that it was written by the Artificial Intelligence Nuwa with her powerful computing abilities. She completed it within five minutes. The information inside was profound yet easily understandable, fully written following the oriental language patterns so that the ones reading it could master them with less effort.

“You bought this? You can buy information on such incredible tech?”

“Save your questions, if those technical problems are impossible to solve, why would I assign you to this project in the first place? It is normal to encounter difficulties, but you shouldn’t give up. I will help you as well, I won’t let you bear all the burden.”

“You are right Mr. Chen.” Song Bo Jun took the flash drive. He felt ashamed in his ability to withstand stress. How could he come to a premature conclusion before he had even begun? Mr. Chen might be young, but his mental attitudes were way beyond him.

He copied the information from the USB flash drive on his computer, and looked at around 10 pages of the technical documents. His eyes sparkled from seeing the unimaginable. The expression on his face was almost similar to someone fanatic and insane, but it was only out of surprise.

This is totally doable, for sure!

…

Back at home, Chen Jin intended to rest in his room. But suddenly, Chen Gang came towards him, pulling him into the corner with an obscure look. “Son, I want to talk to you about something.”