May 14, Beijing.
The weather had begun to warm up.
Zhao Wenyuan scanned the code on a shared bike downstairs from his long-term rental apartment and started cycling to the Source Intelligence Beijing Research Institute. It was just over a kilometer away, but during the morning rush, cycling was faster than driving.
He swiped his access card to enter the office, greeted a few colleagues he met along the way, and went to make himself a cup of coffee. The equipment was fairly basic: there was no coffee machine, only an electric kettle, so he had brought his own drip coffee bags.
Then Zhao Wenyuan returned to his director's office, switched on his computer, and began checking the training progress.
He had already come down from the euphoria of getting training to run on a cluster of domestically produced GPUs.
An achievement he would not even have dared dream of six months earlier could no longer make him happy.
Zhao Wenyuan reflected on this. Perhaps he had spent so much time around Boss Han that even miraculous achievements had become routine. People were remarkably good at getting used to new things.
Now he had a new problem: not enough time.
Normally, two to three weeks was a perfectly reasonable duration for a post-training job.
But if Glutinous Rice Ball 1.0 was to make the Artificial Intelligence Conference's closed-door evaluation, two weeks would be tight, and there was not enough time for three. Simply put, nothing could go wrong during training. Then they would have to pray they were lucky enough to finish testing, compile the materials, and submit everything before the conference's blind evaluation deadline.
Judging by their current progress, though, it probably was not going to happen.
The day before yesterday, the estimated training completion date had been May