What exactly happened in Chapter 75?

"They asked me how I felt about the company these past few days and whether I had adapted well in all aspects."

"Oh!" Manager Qin nodded, believing it to be true, but still sighed, "It seems that President Chen is very concerned about you interns this year. In previous years, he never shook hands with interns, let alone asked if you were adapting well."

Jin Zhenzhen looked at Zhang Pengfei with envy and said without any attempt to hide it, "Wow, I'm so envious of you! I wish President Chen could ask me that too!"

Zhang Pengfei smiled politely, thinking to himself, "If you knew what I've been through, you probably wouldn't envy me so much."

After the brief incident, the meeting continued. Forty or fifty minutes later, Li Huina came out to refill Chen Jingyang's coffee. Manager Qin hurriedly instructed several interns to go in and see if the other senior executives also needed refills.

As soon as Zhang Pengfei entered, he heard Chen Jingyang say impatiently, "...H2O's FP8 accuracy is a joke when it comes to sparse computing! The benchmark they provided was run on an ideal dataset. As soon as our model was run on it, the latency immediately spiked by 50%!"

The purchasing director flipped through the reports, his face full of worry: "What can we do? The Davilink H20's computing power is only 60% of the A100's, and Moore's Threads is stuck on compiler compatibility issues. How many people do we need to invest in adaptation? Ascendas..."

Hardware architect Bai Zheng interrupted him and said to Chen Jingyang, "Boss, Zenti gave us a hint in private. If we sign an exclusive contract, they can open up the underlying API of DVFS, which can help us optimize energy efficiency by another 15%."

Chen Jingyang sneered: "Exclusive? Isn't that like drinking poison to quench thirst? But DVFS... never mind, I'll write it down for later negotiations..."

What is DVFS? An API?! Zhang Pengfei finished his work and quickly looked it up on his phone.

The chip selection meeting lasted until 10:30. Chen Jingyang only rested for 10 minutes before immediately starting the next meeting to review the sparsification scheme for large models.

When Zhang Pengfei went in to refill his drink around 11 a.m., Chief Scientist Dr. Liu was writing on the whiteboard and saying, "Our L0 regularization path is correct, but the instability of gradient descent is quite serious now..."

Dr. Huang from the algorithm team asked him, "Dr. Liu, we've tried it, and the model's performance on common sense question answering collapsed after the pruning rate exceeded 70%. Should we not be so aggressive and start from 50%?"

Dr. Liu immediately rejected the idea: "No way! Costs force us to be aggressive; users won't pay for our electricity bills! Let's change our approach. Instead of simply pruning, let's use knowledge distillation to teach the smaller model the 'thinking method' of the larger model after it becomes sparse. You guys hurry up, I need to see the new solution next week."

Chen Jingyang sighed softly and made a mark on his notebook: "Okay, let's move on to the next topic..."

The normal time to leave work and have lunch is 12 o'clock, but this plan review meeting didn't end until 12:30. Zhang Pengfei was starving, and Jin Zhenzhen and Zhao Tianming weren't much better off.

After finally getting through the meeting, the three of them rushed inside to tidy up—there was another meeting at 1:30 pm!

Before erasing the words on the blackboard, Zhang Pengfei glanced at it. He couldn't understand any of the formulas, but he could clearly see one line of large text: Goal: Reduce inference costs by 50% => Increase chip computing power by 40%!

He seemed to suddenly understand why Chen Jingyang had compromised when he heard about opening DVFS at the chip selection meeting. It turned out that improving the chip's computing power was the only way to reduce costs!

At 2:30 p.m., the group went in for more drinks. Sales VP Zhou was giving a passionate speech: "Stanleymos has softened its stance, but they require all data to be deployed locally and that we sign an unlimited liability data security agreement. The price will probably double."

The CFO shook his head and smiled: "Doubling? Have you calculated how much our hardware and maintenance costs will skyrocket? According to this model, the gross profit margin will actually drop below 30%."

President Zhou looked at Chen Jingyang with a troubled expression: "President Chen..."

Chen Jingyang paused for a moment, then made the decision: "Sign! But the terms must be amended. The upper limit for data security liability is set at 100% of the total contract amount, no higher. The price can be negotiated to three times the current amount. We should make money from Limor! Financial clients are far less sensitive to price than to security and performance. This will be our benchmark case for Q1."

The meeting ended at 3 p.m., followed immediately by a quarterly report preview for investors at 3:30 p.m., and then almost seamlessly transitioned to a negotiation meeting for an autonomous driving cooperation with a foreign company at 5 p.m.

Watching Chen Jingyang chug cup after cup of coffee, Zhang Pengfei suddenly felt a pang of sympathy for him.

When they lived together before, Chen Jingyang rarely came home for dinner. Even if he could come home early, he would most likely be working late into the night.

Back then, Chen Jingyang would always hug him and complain about being tired whenever he got home. Zhang Pengfei couldn't imagine what he was busy with all day at the company, or how he could be so tired.

Now we know that Chen Jingyang's workload that day was truly immense!

It was six o'clock, time to leave work, but the meeting was still not over.

Zhang Pengfei was a little anxious. Hua Hua's daycare ended at 6:30, and if they didn't leave now, it would be too late by the time they got there.

But since Manager Qin wasn't there, and neither Jin Zhenzhen nor Zhao Tianming mentioned leaving get off work, he couldn't just leave directly. So he tentatively sent Manager Qin a message asking if he could leave a little earlier, but Manager Qin didn't reply!

At 6:30, Manager Qin returned and immediately said to Zhang Pengfei, "Wait a little longer, it should be over soon. There will be many more meetings like this in the future, so you should be prepared to work overtime."

She had just finished speaking when Chen Jingyang came out of the conference room, seemingly to go to the restroom. Seeing Zhang Pengfei still standing outside, he frowned and asked, "You...?"

He had barely uttered the words when he suddenly realized there were other people around, so he forced a "they" after "you": "Why are you still here?"

Don't you need to pick up the flowers?!

Manager Qin hurriedly explained, "President Chen, the three of them will be in charge of the top-floor conference room from now on, so I want them to familiarize themselves with it as soon as possible so that they can carry out their work better in the future."

Chen Jingyang understood instantly and said calmly, "This meeting is still a long way off. Optimistically, it won't end until eight o'clock. Let them all go home!"

After saying that, as if remembering something, he said to Manager Qin, "From now on, don't use interns for meetings after 5 o'clock, unless I ask them to be there, otherwise let them leave work on time."

Manager Qin agreed, completely bewildered, utterly unable to understand what was wrong with Chen Jingyang!

Didn't the company always treat interns like beasts of burden?

He didn't say anything back then!