Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

As a top student from Huake University’s class for gifted youth and a PhD in electrical engineering from UIUC, his expertise was in computer vision, image processing, and voice recognition technology.

In his opinion, Chen Yansen calling him Lao Zhou actually added a sense of familiarity.

Back then, the two had only chatted briefly for half an hour during a video interview, but Zhou Chuangxi had immediately decided to return to Hua Country and join Orange Technology to build a large-scale AI voice model software.

”The HR department is helping you recruit data labelers. Next week, Daniel Povey from Microsoft will also be joining. I’m leaving the Orange Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to the two of you. I hope to see the product launch soon.”

Chen Yansen said, clapping Zhou Chuangxi on the shoulder.

One of them was twenty years old, the other thirty-one. But in front of Chen Yansen, Zhou Chuangxi, the PhD in electrical engineering from UIUC, acted like a humble student.

The main reasons were twofold. First, Chen Yansen offered an extremely generous package: a monthly salary of 100,000 yuan, plus 100,000 shares of Orange Technology stock options vested over four years. If he achieved significant results, there would be additional equity rewards. All told, it amounted to an annual salary of over 4 million yuan.

Second, when he learned that the entire system framework for YuXi had been single-handedly written by Chen Yansen, he was utterly shocked. After reviewing the code, he developed a sense of awe for his new boss.

’He knew in his heart that with Chen Yansen’s programming skills, he could become a top master in the field of AI voice recognition, even in the Lighthouse Country.’

Therefore, under the guise of work, Zhou Chuangxi would find time to discuss the optimization of the voice model with Chen Yansen whenever he could.

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

”Daniel Povey?” Zhou Chuangxi asked subconsciously after hearing his new colleague’s name.

”You know him?” Chen Yansen asked, surprised.

At this time, Daniel wasn’t very famous in the AI field. The Kaldi speech recognition toolkit he was developing was still in its early stages, and his most impressive title was merely that of a senior engineer at the Microsoft Research Institute.

”He gave a guest lecture at UIUC once. He left a deep impression on me. The man’s accomplishments in voice recognition technology are immense.”

Zhou Chuangxi praised him without reservation.

”That’s right, it’s him!” Chen Yansen said with a smile.

”Boss, isn’t he a professor at Johns Hopkins University?” Zhou Chuangxi asked in confusion.

”I told him that the Orange Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory will build a computing cluster with petabyte-level storage and 600 GPUs, achieving a total computing power of 15 PetaFLOPS.”

Chen Yansen shrugged, revealing the main reason Daniel was willing to join Orange Technology.

PetaFLOPS meant it could perform 15 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

Of course, this also had to do with his superhuman, almost ’Succubus-like’ Spiritual Power; with just a few words over the phone, he had secured a top R&D engineer from the future AI world.

Seven years from now, Facebook would offer him the position of chief scientist and a million-US Dollar annual salary, and he would reject it flatly.

Yet Chen Yansen had only offered him a monthly salary of 22,000 US Dollars, and Daniel had eagerly accepted.

A server with 15 PetaFLOPS of computing power was simply too alluring!

After all, the total computing power of the speech processing center at Johns Hopkins University at the time was barely 0.5 PetaFLOPS.

”Boss, are you serious?” Zhou Chuangxi swallowed, asking in disbelief.

”What’s there to be serious about? I had someone run the numbers. The cost is only 300 million yuan.”

Chen Yansen smiled and shook his head, looking unconcerned.

DING. The elevator doors slowly opened.

Zhou Chuangxi hurried after him. ”Boss, that’s 15 PetaFLOPS of computing power! The Lighthouse Country’s Titan supercomputer is only 17.6 PetaFLOPS.”

Chen Yansen just smiled faintly.

’He sighed internally, marveling at how quickly computer processing power evolved.’

Thirteen years later, NVIDIA would launch an AI supercomputer called Project DIGITS, capable of providing 1 PetaFLOPS of floating-point operations per second for only 21,999 yuan.