At the start, I had to choose one of four options, and I immediately picked the Brahmin from the cou

"exchange."

[Ding—1000 Happiness Points deducted, remaining balance: 45 points.]

[Special Item: Small Storage R&D Accelerator (Embedded AI Code Self-Generation Engine) successfully redeemed. Please select the recipient.]

"I'll skip the company for now and go to the Software Park to see Dr. Chen's team."

"Okay, Xiao-ge!"

Zhou Yanhuai, sitting in the passenger seat, gave a wry smile: "Brother Xiao, to put it bluntly, I've studied Dr. Chen's intelligent recruitment system in detail. They do have unique insights into the two core algorithms of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and resume feature extraction, and those three invention patents are also very valuable. But the problem is, in today's B2B (business-to-business) HR SaaS market, it's not just about algorithms, but also about the concurrent processing capabilities of the underlying architecture and the training efficiency of deep learning models."

"Dr. Chen's team consists of only twelve people, all recent graduates from large tech companies or recruited from university labs. Their technical skills are undeniable, but their manpower is severely limited. Currently, the system's bottleneck lies in unstructured data cleaning and high-concurrency matching latency. Once more than 100,000 resumes are imported simultaneously and semantically matched against thousands of complex job descriptions in the background, the server's CPU utilization instantly spikes to over 90%, and the matching time can even extend to several minutes. For the HR departments of large state-owned enterprises or Fortune 500 companies, this response speed is absolutely unacceptable. Dr. Chen complained to me that to solve this underlying architectural problem, they would either have to spend tens of millions to buy a computing power matrix, or spend at least six months manually refactoring the underlying C++ and Python code line by line to optimize the algorithm's complexity."

Zhou Yanhuai sighed: "Six months for restructuring, plus another six months for market promotion and validation. By any measure, we won't make it to the deadline at the end of next year."

Li Xiao leaned back in his leather seat, listening to Zhou Yanhuai's clear and logical analysis. Instead of feeling anxious, he smiled in a deep and unfathomable smile.

"What if I told them I could reduce a six-month task to a week?"

"A week?!" Zhou Yanhuai was stunned, then shook his head repeatedly. "Brother Xiao, that's impossible. Writing code isn't like manual labor where you can just use sheer numbers. Refactoring the underlying logic is delicate work; a small change can have far-reaching consequences. Even if you spent all your money to poach the chief architects from BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent), it would still take them half a month just to familiarize themselves with their current codebases!"

Li Xiao offered no explanation.

"We'll know whether it's possible or not when we get there."

Half an hour later, the Maybach stopped in front of a somewhat dilapidated office building. This was the office space for startups invested in by Lansheng Capital's angel fund.

Pushing open the door at the far end of the third floor, where the Xinglan Information Technology sign hangs, a strong aroma of black coffee mixed with instant noodles wafts out.

In an office space of less than 200 square meters, under dim lighting, a dozen programmers, wearing noise-canceling headphones, stared intently at the rapidly scrolling lines of code on their screens, their eyes bloodshot. The whiteboards around them were densely covered with various mathematical formulas, neural network topology diagrams, and data flow arrows.

"Chen Bo! The loss function has diverged again! Halfway through the third epoch (training round), the memory overflowed (OOM)!" A young backend engineer with messy hair shouted frantically, pulling at his hair.

"Reduce the batch size to 16! Cancel dropout for all fully connected (FC) layers, and make sure the model runs!" In the center of the office area, a slightly overweight middle-aged man with thick black-rimmed glasses and dark circles under his eyes suddenly stood up. He was the core of this team, Dr. Chen Jianzhou, who had spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher in a top overseas AI lab.

"This won't do, boss!" Another programmer in charge of the underlying architecture gulped down a Red Bull, his fingers flying across the keyboard at an astonishing speed. "If we reduce the batch size, our training time will double again! At this rate, the V2.0 version of that 'multi-dimensional semantic association engine' won't even be ready for testing next week, let alone next month! The system's spatiotemporal complexity is too high right now; our current algorithm architecture simply can't handle the massive concurrency of data!"

Dr. Chen rubbed his temples in frustration, his eyes filled with resentment and exhaustion.

He knew his team's research and development direction was absolutely cutting-edge. Most recruitment systems on the market are based on simple "keyword matching" (for example, if the resume contains "Java" and the job description also contains "Java," it's considered a match). What they were developing, however, was a next-generation engine based on "deep semantic understanding and knowledge graphs." It could understand the implicit capabilities behind a resume and analyze whether a job seeker's career path highly aligns with the company's long-term development.

The technology was good, but the engineering challenges of implementing it far exceeded the limits of his startup team. The underlying code became increasingly bloated, and the technical debt piled up higher and higher. They were like pushing a cart in a quagmire, exhausting all their strength for every step forward.

"Let's stop for a moment."

A calm yet penetrating voice rang out at the entrance of the office area.

Everyone instinctively stopped typing and turned to look. Li Xiao, hands in his trench coat pockets, walked in unhurriedly with Zhou Yanhuai and Zheng Hao. His impeccably tailored dark bespoke suit seemed out of place in this chaotic geek space, yet it exuded an absolute, intimidating aura that made it difficult to look directly at him.

"Mr. Li?!" Dr. Chen was taken aback, quickly put down his coffee cup, and rushed over, his expression tinged with guilt. "Why did you come in person? I'm sorry, Mr. Li, the underlying reconstruction of version V2.0 has encountered some trouble, and the progress may be a few months later than we promised in the BP (business plan)..."

As a pure technical person, Dr. Chen felt extremely anxious about not being able to deliver on time despite receiving investment money.

"I'm not here to hear a self-criticism."

Li Xiao walked directly to Dr. Chen's workstation, glanced at the error logs on the screen that were flashing red lights, and asked calmly, "Where exactly is the core bottleneck right now?"

Dr. Chen sighed, pointed to an extremely complex architecture diagram on the whiteboard, and reported in the simplest language:

"Mr. Li, the problem lies in the coupling between computing efficiency and the underlying code. Our deep semantic model is too large, and the existing codebase has become extremely bloated after several iterations. When processing unstructured data (such as long self-evaluations or complex project experiences), the system has too many redundant logical loops. To achieve your requirement of 100,000 concurrent requests per millisecond, we must completely overhaul the existing C++ underlying layer and Python algorithm layer, and introduce the latest dynamic attention mechanism and asynchronous coroutine framework. But this requires a huge amount of code refactoring work. With our current team of twelve, even working day and night, it will take at least six months."

"Six months is too long, I'll only give you one month."