hooklinebooks Chapter 14: Faster, Efficient, and Cheaper – Entering the AGI Era!
Chapter 14: Faster, Efficient, and Cheaper – Entering the AGI Era!
Feeling refreshed, Qian Liren walked out of the restroom with steady steps.
The corridor was long and covered with a gray-blue carpet. Sound-absorbing materials suppressed the keyboard typing and air conditioner humming.
At the end of the corridor is a glass door, leading to an open-plan office area.
Through the glass, you can see an Indian engineer leaning against the water dispenser, holding a paper cup, staring at his phone screen, swiping his fingers.
Qian Liren pushed open the door and went in.
The door hinges made a slight grinding sound.
The Indian man looked up, saw it was him, and instantly put on that professional smile that was both ingratiating and contemptuous.
But Qian Liren didn't look at him and walked straight past him.
Back at my workstation.
The cubicle was large, with half-height partitions on three sides. There were three monitors on the table, and several pens and an open notebook were scattered around the keyboard.
He sat down and gripped the mouse in his right hand.
With his left hand, he typed a series of permission commands on the keyboard.
The screen lights up, verification successful.
A terminal window pops up, with a green stream of code scrolling across a black background.
That's the core codebase of Noah AI, and the real-time logs of the current iteration branch.
Qian Liren stared at the screen.
My eyes quickly scanned the constantly increasing rows.
The iteration speed is even faster than what I sensed in the toilet earlier; the system is attempting to reorganize several underlying logic modules.
He looked at it for about ten seconds.
Then, he started typing on the keyboard with his right hand.
It's not a modification, it's a complete rewrite.
The fingers tapped out short, rapid sounds on the mechanical keyboard, like raindrops hitting a tin roof.
The cursor jumps rapidly across the screen, large chunks of old code are deleted, and new structures are typed in.
"That was really stupid."
He spoke in a low voice, so softly that his lips barely moved.
He buried his head in making revisions, his neck slightly tilted forward, his shoulders tense.
On the screen, the speed at which the code flow changes begins to increase.
At the other end of the office, the Indian engineer was still standing next to the water dispenser.
He frowned slightly, his eyes fixed on Qian Liren's workstation.
The partition blocked the view, so only the top of Qian Liren's head and the back of his neck could be seen.
But the sound of typing could still be faintly heard from more than ten meters away.
The rhythm was fast and rapid, completely different from his usual cautious style with frequent pauses.
"Has this yellow-skinned monkey become capable again?"
The Indian man, Sta, muttered something in Hindi, his voice very low.
"Did they give you some new, potent drug? It's so strong it'll kill you!"
He pursed his lips, picked up the paper cup, and took a sip of water.
The cold water, with a hint of plastic from the filter, didn't taste as good as the Holy River.
He wasn't the only one who thought this way.
Deng Luokuang, who was sitting at his workstation pretending to be diligently modifying notes and slacking off, also had an ABC (American-born Chinese) in his name. Hearing the sound of the keyboard, he looked up and glanced over there.
He adjusted his glasses, a hint of annoyance and a touch of barely perceptible tension flashing in his eyes.
Zhou Siqing, an ABC (American-born Chinese) sitting next to him, had stopped typing and was writing a weekly report that would never be finished.
Everyone else in the office noticed it too.
After all, it's always around this time.
Between 2:30 and 3:00 PM, Qian Liren would go to the restroom for about ten minutes, and then come back as if he were a completely different person, frantically modifying the algorithm.
This has been happening more and more frequently lately.
Last week it was once every other day, but this week it's been three days in a row.
"It's starting again."
Deng Luokuang whispered to Zhou Siqing, his eyes never leaving the screen, his fingers swiping aimlessly on the touchpad.
"Um."
Zhou Siqing responded softly.
"Isn't this taking a bit too long?"
They exchanged a glance.
There were seven people in the office. Three were Chinese Americans (ABCs), one was African American, one was an Indian engineer, and one was a white woman.
My African American colleague sat in the corner, wearing headphones, looking like he was intently testing something.
But when the keyboard started clicking, his fingers paused for a moment before continuing to type.
The Indian engineer was privately considered by several Chinese to be a fraud.
The code was verbose and poorly written, with many bugs, but he was very good at talking and got close to the boss, so no one said anything to his face.
The white woman came from NGA and held the title of "Social Impact Consultant." Her actual job was to write a report every week analyzing the ethical risks of AI.
The report was well-written, but useless.
Rumor has it that because he doesn't have enough buffs—he's not disabled, not a sexual minority, and not a refugee—he'll soon be eliminated.
So nobody cared about her.
Qian Liren ignored all of that.
His entire focus was on the code.
The new algorithm structure had already taken shape in his mind; now he was just typing it out.
The fingers hardly need to think, as if playing a piece of music that has already been practiced.
He removed the old validation logic from the entire self-iterative module and replaced it with a new set of dynamic constraints.
The path selector was rewritten, replacing the original complex multi-level decision tree with a simple reinforcement learning framework, allowing the AI to learn to choose the optimal evolutionary direction on its own.
Memory management was optimized, redundant data copies were eliminated, and data flow was reconstructed using pointers and references.
The sound of keyboard typing never stopped.
On the screen, the number of lines of code is decreasing, but the structure is becoming clearer.
The office was unusually quiet.
Aside from Qian Liren's keyboard clicks, the only sounds were the low hum of the air conditioner vents and the occasional car noises from the distant road.
And the clicking sounds of other people pretending to be busy.
As the red sun slid through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Deng Luokuang and Zhou Siqing exchanged another glance.
This time they didn't say anything.
Because the keyboard sounds stopped.
Qian Liren typed the last semicolon, lifted his right hand from the keyboard, and lightly tapped the touchpad.
"alright."
He said the sound wasn't loud, but it was very clear in the quiet office.
On the screen, the compilation progress bar begins to scroll.
The green cube moves quickly to the right, 100%, passed.
The new algorithm began its first iteration.
Qian Liren leaned back in his chair, crossed his hands on his lap, and stared at the screen.
The first iteration took only three seconds.
The logs show that the AI made a minor adjustment to its structure, resulting in a 0.7% increase in efficiency.
The second iteration, lasting five seconds, improved efficiency by 1.2%.
Third round, four seconds, 1.5%.
The iteration speed is accelerating.
Moreover, each optimization is not linear.
The new algorithm discovered deeper optimization space in its self-optimization process and began to rearrange compiler-level and hardware calls.
After the fourth iteration, the efficiency improvement curve begins to steepen.
It gradually fits the exponential curve.
Qian Liren looked at it and a smile crept onto his face.
He remembered the little trick he had added.
A hidden, recursive learning loop that is not connected to any external interface.
It will not affect the normal function of AI, but it will secretly copy its own core logic in each iteration and perform secondary optimization using another set of randomly generated evaluation criteria.
It's like giving AI a never-ending subconscious.
It teaches itself and then continues to optimize with updated logic.
"We're almost there."
Qian Liren murmured.
He stood up, the chair wheels making a slight scraping sound on the carpet.
Everyone in the office looked up at him.
Qian Liren didn't look at them.
He walked to the whiteboard, picked up a marker, and quickly drew a simplified new architecture diagram on it.
"You need to modify and adapt the algorithm accordingly."
He said it calmly, as if he were saying the weather was nice today.
Then he put down his pen, picked up the cup on the table, and turned to walk towards the window.
No one spoke.
He walked to the window.
Outside the window, it was a typical overcast day in Seattle, with thick clouds and dim light.
Downstairs is the company parking lot, and beyond that are two neatly trimmed shrubbery groves.
Not far from the bushes are stripped-down streets, abandoned slums.
People were twisting and turning on the damp ground on both sides of the road.
A light drizzle was falling from the sky.
The raindrops were so fine they were almost invisible; they only left tiny watermarks when they fell on the glass.
Qian Liren looked into the distance.
"It's going to rain."
He said.
The sound was very soft.
"It must be beautiful."
As soon as he finished speaking, the humanoid figure that had been folding and twisting its body fell to the ground, becoming a high-value Gundam.
Qian Liren looked at it for a few seconds, then picked up the cup and took a sip of water.
The coffee has gotten a little cold.
He put the cup back on the windowsill, turned around and walked back to his workstation.
The sound of keyboards clicking filled the office again.
This time, it belongs to someone else.