Silence and Outburst

Time passed swiftly, and in the blink of an eye, an academic year came to an end.

Lu Ruoxi advanced to her sophomore year.

Su Yang, as both her follower and rival, managed to keep pace with her without falling behind.

Li Jinchuan had vanished from the public eye for a long time.

The "Qin New Energy" he co-founded with Qin Ya had failed to make any waves over the past year.

It was as though the five million in startup capital and the humiliation from that lecture had been washed away by time.

But Lu Chenyuan knew better—this was a wolf lying in wait.

He was simply biding his time, sharpening his claws and fangs.

The landscape of Jingzhou's business world was also shifting quietly.

Under Lu Chenyuan's leadership, Lu Corporation completed its internal restructuring, and its stock price steadily recovered.

Yuanlong Technology, meanwhile, emerged like a colossal beast out of nowhere.

Its "Boundless" intelligent driving system had already captured half of the domestic new energy vehicle market in Xia.

The superfactory for Yuanlong's own "Boundless" new energy vehicle production had also completed its preliminary preparations and was on the verge of becoming operational.

Under Mo Qingli's leadership, Mo Corporation experienced even more explosive growth.

Whether it was the dominance of its "Candle Dragon" battery system in the new energy sector or the expansion of its materials division beyond Y Country, carving out a new space domestically in Xia, this established conglomerate was revitalizing itself at the cutting edge.

As for Qin Corporation, it seemed unchanged despite Li Jinchuan's involvement.

Yet, international giants had already begun making subtle moves in Jingzhou.

...

This year, Lu Ruoxi's name began appearing frequently in the international mathematics community.

It was as if she had broken free from shackles, unleashing her talent without reservation.

Putnam Mathematical Competition—Grand Prize.

International Collegiate Mathematical Modeling Contest—Grand Prize.

She was conquering the highest echelons of academia.

The girl who once had to work part-time to pay her tuition in Anhe County now stood at the pinnacle among her peers.

She grew more confident, more focused.

Her world became purely about those beautiful formulas and theorems.

Su Yang, too, lived up to his potential.

Lu Chenyuan invested in an independent laboratory at Jingzhou University, for both him and Lu Ruoxi.

Affiliated with the Computer Science and Mathematics departments, the lab was fully funded, equipped, and staffed by Yuanlong Technology.

Su Yang became the chief researcher of this lab, named "Pangu."

He displayed an almost terrifying intuition and creativity in computer science.

One day, cheers erupted in the Pangu Lab.

"We did it! The model runs!"

"My god, Su Yang, you're a genius!"

Su Yang looked at the perfectly converging curve on the screen and smiled with relief.

He had done it.

After months of sleepless nights with his team, they had finally developed a groundbreaking natural language processing model based on deep residual networks and attention mechanisms.

He named it "Nuwa."

Lu Ruoxi walked over.

After glancing at the data on the screen, a flicker of admiration crossed her eyes.

"It's a brilliant model," she said. "Its semantic comprehension is an order of magnitude ahead of all publicly available models."

"But..." Su Yang's brow furrowed again.

"The computational cost is staggering."

He pointed to the monitoring data on another screen.

"We had to allocate thirty percent of the university's supercomputing resources just to complete one full training cycle."

"A single training run burns through hundreds of thousands. There's no way to commercialize this."

The lab's jubilant atmosphere instantly turned somber.

A model too costly for practical use, no matter how advanced, was just an expensive toy.

"Where's the bottleneck?" Lu Ruoxi asked.

"CPUs," Su Yang pinpointed.

"Our current computing architecture revolves around CPUs. They excel at logic control but struggle with large-scale, parallel floating-point operations."

"The parameter count in 'Nuwa' is enormous. Every training session is like forcing a logician to perform hundreds of millions of simple additions and subtractions. The efficiency is abysmal."

Su Yang slumped slightly, as if he had scaled a peak only to find an insurmountable sky beyond.

...

In the top-floor office of Yuanlong Technology, Lu Chenyuan reviewed the report from the Pangu Lab, handed to him by Lin Yuan.

At the end was Su Yang's signature and his dilemma: the computational bottleneck.

A faint smile tugged at Lu Chenyuan's lips.

History had a way of repeating itself.

He knew the solution, of course.

GPUs.

Graphics processing units.

In the world he came from, these tiny chips, originally designed for video games, had accidentally ushered in the golden age of artificial intelligence over a decade later.

With thousands of cores built for massive parallel computing, they were the perfect key for running deep learning models.

He could give Su Yang the answer right now.

It would save him—and Yuanlong—three to five years of trial and error.

It would bring "Nuwa" into the world ahead of schedule.

But...

Lu Chenyuan drummed his fingers lightly on the desk, deep in thought.

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

Handing Su Yang the solution outright would rob him and his team of the invaluable experience of solving a high-level design challenge independently.

That would stunt their growth.

Technological progress wasn't just about flashes of insight.

More importantly, it was about the process—the relentless experimentation, the dead ends, and ultimately, the breakthrough.

That process itself was the real treasure.

After careful consideration, Lu Chenyuan made his decision.

He wouldn't intervene.

At least, not yet.

He picked up the phone and called Lin Yuan.

"Tell Su Yang I've read his report."

"'Nuwa' is promising. Yuanlong will support it fully."

"He doesn't need to worry about funding. Let him experiment boldly."

"Also, sign him up for this year's World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC). Have him and his team see what the world's best are doing."

"Yes, Chairman Lu."

Hanging up, Lu Chenyuan gazed out the window.

He believed in Su Yang's potential.

What he wanted wasn't a technician who merely followed orders.

He wanted a true scientist—one who could stand beside him and shape an era.

Sometimes, the greatest help was no help at all.

Just provide a vast enough stage and the capital to fail endlessly.

Then wait, quietly, for the seed to break through the soil on its own.