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As a new force in the tech field, Prism Sciences had been making very big moves lately.
Word had it they were setting up a brain-machine technology research center and were currently throwing money around like mad in the country's brain-machine field to poach people. Whether grad students or doctoral candidates, anyone they took a liking to started at four hundred thousand dollars a year, no less.
As for professors and experts who already had results to their name, even on a part-time basis the starting figure was four million.
It was the very picture of a wealthy tycoon.
But the industry was extremely bullish on this move by Prism Sciences.
Why?
Because to this day, no one had managed to replicate Triton-1's brain-control device.
Prism was now a benchmark-level existence in the global brain-machine field.
It hadn't quite reached Intel's status in the chip field, but it was already stronger than Apple in the phone world. Calling it a single-region overlord didn't even do it justice.
A company like this announcing the establishment of a brain-machine research center was like Apple announcing it was developing a new phone. No one would fail to be bullish on it.
No small number of people wanted to climb aboard with Prism, too.
This time, though, they'd gotten smarter and didn't go off investing in other brain-machine companies again.
As the old saying goes, if you can't beat them, join them.
I can't beat you, so surely I can at least join you?
And so, before anyone even knew where the research center's doors would open, companies from various fields had already come knocking one after another to seek cooperation.
Companies in the medical field wanted to launch brain-neural-signal decryption projects, deeply researching brain-neural signals and the cerebral cortex from new angles.
Industrial manufacturing wanted to develop a new type of mechanical arm to replace human labor in certain special operations.
Phone companies wanted to use the brain-control device to control phones directly, freeing phone operation from the fingers from then on.
These companies brought their own provisions, standing at the door of Ryan's father's office with their moneybags in hand, waiting for the previous person to finish talking before going in themselves.
For these cooperation requests, Prism Sciences, after weighing its own research capacity, selectively accepted a portion, which also happened to ease the research center's funding pressure along the way.
So far, Prism Sciences had secured three billion dollars in loans, two billion of it interest-free and one billion at an ultra-low rate.
But a good deal of this money had gone toward buying land and putting up buildings, namely the new research center tower next to the small town's prosthetics research center.
Besides the new center, Prism had also taken a large swath of the surrounding land, preparing to build the area into its own research hub down the line.
Ryan's father knew that establishing a research hub in this spot was inconvenient. The place was remote, the transportation undeveloped, and the surrounding talent resources essentially zero. The college graduates in that town didn't include a single one from a top-ranked university.
But what could he do, when his son was right in this region?
The string of moves still wasn't over.
After Ryan's father finished consulting his friends about the current state of artificial intelligence in the country, he soon set about preparing Prism's AI research center.
The moment this news got out, the outside world was thrown into another uproar. Everyone was astonished.
Prism's moves were too cocky.
Giving up being a homegrown overlord of the brain-machine field to dabble in artificial intelligence?
In the country's AI software field, the main players were the three major internet giants and a leading hardware-and-telecom company, whose AI research, integrated with their own businesses, spanned nearly every field.
Below them were some smaller companies and startups specializing in fields like computer vision and voice recognition, taking the specialized-and-refined path.
The big companies needn't be discussed. They were never short of resources of any kind.
The reason those smaller companies dared to set foot in the AI field was, for the most part, that the company's own boss was extremely familiar with AI, sometimes even an elite figure who'd jumped ship from one of the big firms.
Look at Prism, on the other hand. Although it was no small operation now, compared to the several big firms above, it could still only be counted a child.
More importantly, Prism Sciences had no AI-related genes inside the company at all. To Prism Sciences, artificial intelligence was an entirely unfamiliar field.
For them to walk into it was like walking blindly into a tiger's den. Not certain death, perhaps, but nine deaths to one survival for sure.
In short, not many were bullish.
What's more, even the people willing to come were few.
Prism Sciences' HR was in quite a bind. AI was still an industry riding the crest of the wave right now, talent hadn't reached saturation, and engineers preferred to work at the big firms. Next they'd consider other companies that were likewise in the big cities, and only at the very, very end might they consider remote Prism.
It was completely unlike the earlier scene in the brain-machine field, where Prism Sciences raised its arm with a shout and an army of thousands came rushing over with their own provisions in tow.
Recruiting dragged on for over a month. The hardware engineers hired earlier had already roughly set up the AI compute platform before a complete team was finally, just barely, scraped together.
The AI compute platform was installed in Prism's new research center.
This tower, basement levels included, was only twenty floors, and had been completed and handed over half a month ago, though to this day the surroundings were still a chaotic construction mess.
Ryan met his parents here for the first time in a good while, and then everyone followed the hardware engineer down to the machine room on the first basement level.
Inside, quite a few server cabinets were arranged, the operating indicator lights on row after row of servers blinking.
The person responsible for setting up the platform was a middle-aged man named Howard Brennan, who wore gold-rimmed glasses and carried himself with decorum, a piece of talent the big firms had funneled back to society on account of his age.
He explained slowly. "The AI compute platform we've set up uses top-of-the-line AI servers, each built with four server-grade CPUs and eight AI accelerator chips. A single server can reach two PFLOPS of sixteen-bit floating-point performance per second, that is, two quadrillion operations per second, theoretically able to process sixteen thousand images per second."
Ryan nodded and walked through the middle of the cabinets. The various cables in the cabinets had been kept very neat. Brennan and his subordinates had a decent work ethic, at least. "What's the compute power of this platform right now?"
"Right now it's sixteen PFLOPS per second." Faced with Ryan's question, Brennan didn't dare slack in the slightest. "It's mainly that time was tight, so we haven't yet optimized our use of these servers during setup. I can keep optimizing on this foundation later, and the compute power can climb higher still."
"This is enough for the time being." Ryan made a quick estimate. With the system's super algorithm, the current compute power was already plenty for it to grow to a fairly terrifying degree.
Seeing that Ryan was satisfied, the heavy stone in Brennan's heart finally settled. He had no desire to lose this job too.
Ryan's father and mother trailed behind Ryan, listening to him and Brennan talk in their professional field. Unable to understand a word of it, the two of them simply left the machine room.
Outside, Mason and the others had come over as well, here to take a look at their new work environment.
Coming along at the same time were the heads of the other two research centers.
The prosthetics, brain-machine, and AI research centers each had their own space within this new tower.
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