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Ryan's father sought out the three research center heads for a chat, to build up a bit of rapport.
Except that Mason, glancing at the two big shots beside him, felt thoroughly uncomfortable the moment he recalled their titles.
The one in charge of the brain-machine technology research center was Professor Walter Finch, wearing a simple long-sleeved undershirt, looking very plain and unassuming as a person. But he was a professor in the biomedical engineering department at Caltech, the universally acknowledged number one in the country's brain-computer interface field.
Of course, that title applied to the era before Ryan came into the world.
The other big shot was named Leo Hargrove, the former chief architect of the autonomous-driving project at a major internet company. He'd been poached after his contract ended, and now headed the artificial intelligence research center.
Standing alongside these two, he, the head of the prosthetics research center, inevitably looked far too small-time.
Of course, the other two didn't care about this in the least. Neither of them was the type whose vision sat higher than the heavens. They simply chatted comfortably with Ryan's father, now and then sharing their thinking about their future work, which served as a reassurance for him.
Off to the side, Ryan walked out of the machine room.
Seeing him, Finch and Hargrove both hurried to greet him, addressing him as Chief Designer.
The chief project designer title now hanging over his head had solved a real problem for quite a few people, namely the problem of how to address him.
For a young person like Mason, calling him "The Mech Expert" was nothing, and actually came across as friendly. But many of the people he dealt with day to day were middle-aged, and following suit with that would have seemed flippant.
Yet not calling him that left nothing else appropriate. Now that this title existed, addressing him was no longer awkward.
"Professor Finch, it really has been a long time. How did you end up over here at Prism Sciences?" Ryan spoke to Finch with a smile.
Professor Finch laughed. "It really has been a while. I'd been thinking about when I might come back to see you and ask you a few questions. The opportunity happened to come up, and I figured that if I joined the project, wouldn't seeing you become a lot easier?"
"If you wanted to find me, couldn't you have just come to the base?" Ryan shook his head, not buying the old fellow's words.
Professor Finch had been one of the professors who studied at Scrapper before, and had taken part in the firefighting mech's neural connection retrofit work, only to return to teaching partway through for reasons relating to his school. Seeing him here this time left Ryan quite astonished.
Ryan then turned to Hargrove, shook his hand, and welcomed his arrival.
After that, Ryan began telling the two of them about the research centers' tasks.
He started with Finch. "The brain-machine research center was set up to maximize the use of neural connection technology, while also developing the technology in greater depth and applying it to fields beyond prosthetics."
"Of course, the prosthetic brain-control device research can't stop either, so the various groups within the center will need you to spare some time to keep an eye on them, Professor."
Finch nodded, indicating that he understood, and went on to verify with Ryan the projects already confirmed at the research center, along with the research routes those projects would need to take.
The brain-machine research center didn't only study neural connection. Traditional brain-machine technology would be involved as well, which was precisely why Finch had come.
Once Ryan finished with Finch, he turned to Hargrove. "Let's go, Director Hargrove. Let's go take a look at our AI compute platform together."
"I'll tag along and watch the fun too." Finch followed the two of them into the machine room.
Before Ryan had come out earlier, he'd already transferred the artificial intelligence onto this platform for training, so the first thing everyone saw walking in was the training display on the computer.
"This compute platform isn't enough." Hargrove's first words walking in were exactly this.
He took one look at the machine room and his brow furrowed high.
Although a fair number of AI servers had been set up, compared to the machine room at his former employer's, it didn't measure up at all.
It had to be said, what Prism's HR had told him back then was that the company's technology was superb and its algorithms unbeatable. They'd talked it up for a long while before he'd agreed to come.
Otherwise, he'd have gone off to start his own venture.
But looking at this machine room now, it didn't look the least bit like superb technology. He never should have believed that nonsense back then. For a moment, he even started to doubt his earlier decision.
Ryan walked up to the display, hid the algorithm training page, and opened the AI program on it.
"The compute power right now is plenty for training the algorithm. We can upgrade the compute platform later. It's not a big deal." He spoke placidly.
Hargrove still wanted to say something, but Ryan had already called him up to the computer.
"Let's start by looking at the algorithm's training results."
Hargrove set his agitation aside too, deciding to take a good look at just how miraculous this genius Ryan's algorithm really was.
The general impression people had of Ryan was that he was formidable at building mechs and prosthetics. They really didn't know that Ryan did AI as well. The first time Hargrove had heard it, he'd found it extremely surprising too.
Ryan pulled up the AI's command page, then gave up his seat.
"Here. Just input a command in this dialog box and you can control this AI," Ryan said to Hargrove.
Hargrove sat down and took over the computer. "What command do I input?"
"Just type out whatever you want to say."
"This AI has already done natural language training?" Hargrove caught on at once.
"Yes. Go ahead. Its strongest areas right now are image processing and natural language." Ryan was rather looking forward to this AI's functions too.
Hearing this, Hargrove immediately had a direction. He found an image of a foreign street online, showed it to the AI, and typed in the dialog box. "Identify the objects in the image one by one."
In the blink of an eye, an annotated image appeared on the screen.
The people and objects in the photo had all been drawn with boxes by the AI, with their names above the boxes.
Hargrove was a little surprised the moment he saw this image.
Not for any other reason, but because there were simply too many things labeled in this photo.
The people and objects fully visible in the image had all been marked out. But what he hadn't expected was that the houses serving as the background had also been labeled one by one, down to even a single brick on the ground.
"Isn't this too detailed?" Even Finch, watching the fun off to the side, leaned in.
"Image recognition is something it learned long ago. It can already process images," Ryan said.
Hearing this, Hargrove was startled again, and immediately set a problem he considered difficult. The result was that the AI still gave a near-perfect answer in under a second.
After that, he ran several more tests, all with the same perfect results. This time Hargrove was genuinely surprised. Only now did he realize that the HR seemingly hadn't lied.
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