Forever Yours
37
Growth and Principles
HENRY TRIED to maintain consistent participation in his study group, even though his class load was lighter than the others and he wasn’t on campus as much or as long as they were. He was often gone by noon and since his courses were all electives, none happened to be shared by his study partners. He had Subword Modeling for two hours on Tuesday and Thursday. Monte Carlo Methods and Applications and Family History and Social Understanding were each an hour a day on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
As a result, the study group decided to meet once a week at the row house in the fourth floor lounge. The study sessions usually started with a pizza and went well into the night on Wednesdays. Lisa had suggested the arrangement, and it had worked out well.
Until Chastity moved in. She had everything ready to move out of her apartment a week before the end of the month, so rather than wait until she had to be out, Henry, Lisa, and Luke helped her move a week early. They were all still trying to figure out how the new dynamic in the house worked without expecting her to start every night in Lisa and Henry’s bed.
When the study group met Wednesday night, Chastity brought a couple of her course books to the fourth floor as well. She was still catching some online courses to finish her AA degree. Her own studies had slowed down as soon as the company was formed.
“Mind if I join you to study tonight?” she asked as she walked into the lounge.
Chastity was dressed like Chastity. The weather was still warm and the fourth floor was comfortable, so the shape-hugging booty shorts and crop top were appropriate for a casual study session. Everyone else was still wearing shorts, though perhaps not as revealing as Chastity’s.
“Oh, hell yeah,” Dan said. “You can sit right here on my lap. I don’t mind at all.”
“Excuse me?” Chas said.
Henry stood, but Leonard and Josh both rounded on Dan. Dan had been more and more an outsider to the group as they progressed through the program. It was generally known that he’d been the one who tipped off the army captain the previous spring as to Henry’s likely involvement in the Chinese affair. They’d all been careful about what they said around him since then.
“Dude, seriously?” Josh said. “You speak to a woman like that?”
“What? Look at how she’s dressed.”
“What difference does that make?” Leonard asked. “We’re talking about your comments, not her.”
Josh, Lisa, Leonard, and Simon had all worked on contracts for Open Cloak and had seen Chastity in many jaw-dropping outfits. Regardless, they weren’t about to comment on it in a professional or collegial environment, nor anywhere else for that matter. Simon immediately stood up and positioned himself between Chastity and the offensive person, asking her what she was studying and subtly moving them away slightly. Lisa went to join them.
“Look, a woman dresses like that, she wants some action. No question. What’s she even doing here? You said this wasn’t an office any longer.”
“She lives here,” Henry growled. Dan looked puzzled.
“How was I to know that?”
“Why would it make a difference?” Josh asked. “We’re in Henry’s home. He can have anyone here he wants. And I can’t imagine he wants you. You organized our hackathon when we tried to break into his server. You squealed to the first cute woman you saw after the Chinese affair and pointed out Henry. You’ve been getting more and more gross as time goes by. What is your problem?”
“You have no evidence I said anything,” Dan said nervously.
“Captain Bernard was by to visit a couple of times this summer at our office. Seems she became kind of attached to Conrad and insisted on a full disclosure when he came to work for us,” Henry said.
“Shit! You can’t trust a woman! She said no one would ever know,” Dan said.
“Guys, I hate to put it this way, but we can continue to meet with our study group on campus from now on,” Henry said. “Or we can continue to meet here without Dan. Gather up your shit and get out of my house, Dan.”
“That is just not fair! I’ve been part of this group since the first day we were on campus!”
“If you’d said something like that to me, I’d have kicked you in the balls,” Simon said, rounding on Dan. “After I slapped your face.”
“I’m sick of not having a girl. Lisa wouldn’t have anything to do with me after our first date as freshmen.”
“Last date,” Lisa said. “First and last date.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. You’re just a cunt,” Dan said. “Played your sex up to get in Henry’s bed I’ll bet.”
Henry had been trying to keep his cool—especially since the other guys had taken up the crusade. This comment, however, was too much. Henry slugged Dan in his abundant stomach and Dan doubled over.
“I told you to get out of my house,” Henry said calmly.
“Fuck you! Fuck you all and the cunts you rode in on!” Dan dragged his bag as he stumbled toward the stairs. Leonard and Josh closed behind him to escort him out of the house.
Chastity was leaning on Lisa and Simon had returned to comforting her.
“Are you okay, babe?” Henry asked, stroking her cheek with his finger.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This was all a bad idea. I didn’t mean to cause a problem.”
“You didn’t cause the problem,” Henry said. “The problem was sitting in the room with us. There will never be a time when you aren’t welcome in any gathering where Lisa and I are.”
“Or me!” Simon chimed in. “You are the coolest woman I know. Want to be my bestie?”
“Oh, Simon,” Chastity laughed. “I’ve been your bestie since the first time we met.”
“Let’s go shopping Saturday,” Lisa said brightly.
“Oh, yes!” Simon exclaimed.
Leonard and Josh returned to the room.
“Is everybody okay?” Josh asked. “We can all take off if you want us to.”
“No. Stay,” Lisa said. “I have a pile of studying. Did any of you take Deep Learning Systems: Algorithms and Implementation?”
“I looked at that course and ran away screaming,” Leonard said. “I’ll listen though if you want to review something.”
“We’re supposed to build a complete deep learning library from scratch, capable of efficient GPU-based operations. I think I could have devoted my entire semester just to this course,” Lisa said.
They had soon settled in for the evening, forgetting all about the unpleasantness with Dan.
Dan did his best on campus to cast shade at the other members of the study group, but the five of them were generally well-liked and considered to be the stars of the program. Henry was looking forward to when they were all graduates and he could hire them full-time. He’d never really had that feeling about Dan.
The thing was that he could see a geometrically growing need for more people in the near future. They had released the network versions of both the optimization app and the search engine. He’d shifted the two testers over to primarily focus on Darrel’s plan for the server security program and to test Forever Yours. Conrad was trying to manage all the projects and he had no dedicated developers to put on the security program.
If they were going to need more developers, they were going to also need more funding. Luke and Isobel were spending the bulk of their office time working on the company prospectus. Henry arranged a meeting for the second Monday of October with Professor Jacoby and suggested they meet at the office. Henry wanted to show off the business to his advisor.
“This is a nice setup,” Jacoby said when he was greeted by Nancy at the front desk. Henry quickly joined him. “I saw the interview in HBR last week. You have a dynamic leader for your company. Luke, is it?”
“Luke’s been one of my best friends for all my life,” Henry said. “I’m just glad he turned out to have a business mind like my coding mind. He’ll join us in a little bit. He has a Monday morning class.”
“The article is just what you needed if you are looking for more funding,” Jacoby said. “Do you have a current sales report?”
“Our quarterly report comes out next week. If we have continued interest with you, we’ll forward it as an addendum to the prospectus,” Henry said. “We won’t be profitable yet, but we are generating income.”
“That’s good to hear.”
They went to the conference room and Henry gave Jacoby the outline of their development progress and what he considered to be his pressing needs for more developers. He figured that for the next couple of months, he could have Leonard and Simon join Josh and Lisa as ten-hour per week contractors and start developing the security program.
“We’re at a point where we could use an actual program manager, too,” Henry said. “We’ve had both Lisa and Darrel filling that role, but that’s not either of their strong suit.”
“And what about your legacy creation app? You’ve decided to call it Forever Yours?”
“Yes. I plan to write a research paper based on it, too. We’ve discovered some interesting things that surprised me.”
“How so?”
“I’ve put the exact same data on two different computers and installed the exact same AI on each. I set the same training parameters. Scientifically, the same inputs should yield the same outputs. But that’s not the case. After setting up the same parameters and asking the same questions of the two AIs, we got two different answers. The longer we trained the AIs and the more questions we fed them, always keeping the parameters the same, the more the answers diverged.”
“Randomness?”
“I think so, but the thing is the answers all have the same tone and use similar phrasing. It’s just as if you asked a random person the same question on two different days. They’d give you the same answer for the most part, but they’d use different words and phrasing. You’d still identify it as being from the same person.”
“You need to start your doctoral work,” Jacoby said.
“I don’t even know if I have time to finish my BS,” Henry laughed.
“I hope so. Can I see one of the tests?”
“We can do one live.”
Henry had used the search engine to scrape the internet for all it could find on a specific public personage. The person was recently deceased, so new material was not being generated as frequently as it had been during the person’s life. Henry had no intention of releasing this in any form, but it was strictly here to test the performance of the AI. In fact, he didn’t reveal who the person was.
He used a combined input interface for the two instances of the AI and fed in some of the standard questions.
“Do you have any fears you think are irrational?”
“Do you have a talent you consider useless?”
“What scares you the most?”
In each instance, the answers were not the same, but had similarities that let one easily believe the same person had answered.
“I wonder if you could control the overall temperament of how the person responds,” Jacoby said thoughtfully.
“Would that be fair?”
“A comedy company popular several years ago once put out a sketch in which they could dial a scene in for a different style. They had a scene with the exact same script and staging, but they dialed up ‘funny,’ for example, and the setting turned brighter, the presentation and facial characteristics got lighter, and the overall presentation was just funnier. Then they dialed up ‘irony’ and the scene was suddenly filled with subtle innuendo. The scene outside the window changed to something completely contradictory to what the actor was saying. I look at your app here, and I think the difference between these two instances could be that the person being questioned is in a different mood. This one answered as if it was a little depressed. Giving you the answer, but sounding a little down about it. The other feels more neutral in its response.”
“We’re not controlling that, though,” Henry said. “Still, I see what you mean. The further down this path we go, the more they are each developing a personality. One of the embodiments of the singularity is a little darker than the other.”
Luke joined the two for lunch and presented the prospectus for the company, doing a great job of selling the idea of investing in the next phase of the company’s development.
“We’re looking more for a long-term commitment from investors rather than a sudden cash infusion,” Luke said. “We’d like to see an investor or investor group who will commit to $100 million over four years. The first $25 million will purchase preferred non-voting stock at $1.25 per share. The investment each of the following years would continue to be $25 million per year, but common stock would be purchased at a ten percent discount below market value. We believe we can be stably profitable and ready for an IPO at that time.”
“That’s ambitious. Why the non-voting shares for the first round?” Jacoby asked.
“It is critical that we maintain control over the company for at least two years,” Luke said. “We’ve studied investment capitalization and find that giving up too much control in the early stages tends to kill both motivation and productivity. Fledgling companies are too often purchased and then disassembled into things that can be sold for a profit. We have a number of patents that have not yet appeared in products, but are planned in the near future. It would cripple the company to have those patents sold off for a short term profit.”
“I see. Well, I’m not the chief investor in our consortium. I’m not sure if we have $100 million to toss into a company at the moment. But I like what I see. Your prospectus is nicely done. Send me an income statement current through the third quarter and I’ll present the whole thing to our management team,” Jacoby said.
They weren’t sure if it was really a positive sign, or if they were being gently humored. Nonetheless, Luke promised to forward the requested statement.
“It’s nice to see six figures for income,” Henry said the next week when the board met at his house. The network optimization and network search applications were still fledgling apps, but with Henry’s second Grey’s Analysis interview and Luke’s HBR interview, substantial interest was being generated in the company. Sales revenue from EMEE came in at over $130,000 for the quarter.
“We’re a long way from profitability,” Luke sighed, “but we’re making progress.”
“We’re going to eat that progress up by hiring new people, though,” Isobel said. “We’re just drowning in a bigger pool.”
“It’s going to improve, babe,” Luke calmed her. “We’ve only been in business with a product for eleven months.”
“I know,” she snapped, shaking his hand off hers. “How soon does Forever Yours get to market?”
“It’s in final testing,” Henry said. “Lisa made a few last adjustments to the UI last week that gives us better display of still images. The app is now in the hands of all the people who have been compiling their content. It is in the training stage and they are all reporting good results.”
“It will be nice to sell something for $495 instead of $4.95,” Isobel said.
“Remember, this is a higher ticket item, but it’s higher cost as well. It’s fulfilled by physical delivery and at that price, it won’t sell anywhere near the number of copies,” Henry said. “Fortunately, I’m slated for another interview on Grey’s Analysis next week to coincide with the release. Then I’m supposed to meet with the editor of AI Today the week after that for an interview. Darla is trying to get it out in a variety of publications.”
“What are we doing to promote it?” Luke asked. “It seems like no one will buy into it if they can’t see it working?”
“I can cover some of that,” Chastity said. “I worked with Darla to place a copy with a few influencers who agreed to record their stories and make them public. We sent them out a month ago. The content has been uploaded to a server out in California—the same company that hosts Pythia Speaks. Henry installed the AI and the test subjects can continue to upload content for the training. What’s more, Henry’s parents, Lisa’s parents, and Lisa’s grandparents have all agreed to make their content public. Ads will run in magazines and online, linking to the apps so people can ask questions and get answers from these people.”
“I’ve also done training walls for my grandparents. They’ve all been dead for years, so the walls are of content scraped together from things I found in Mom and Dad’s attic and information that I was able to find on the internet—which was a surprising amount when I set our search engine to finding it. All told, there will be twenty people with public Forever Yours sites,” Henry said.
“And it’s all complete and ready to go?” Isobel asked. The astonishment was hard to conceal.
“The first release will not include video creation, and still images will be limited to existing images, not generative. Our first upgrade will be to search and use video, and then we’ll work on doing generative AI on the video and still images,” Henry said. “The project will grow significantly over the next year. Some of the pieces are really hard and that’s part of why we need more experienced developers.”
“I feel like only being in the office ten hours a week or so since going back to school this fall has really left me out of the loop,” Luke said. “Thanks to both of you for spearheading this next release. I think that we need to approve the new hires, even without having another round of investment lined up.”
“Agreed,” Chastity said.
“Agreed,” Henry responded.
Isobel looked hard at her screen and tapped another key.
“Okay. I agree. I just want to see the numbers rocket,” she said.
“We didn’t really talk about Pythia in the meeting,” Luke said as he and Henry sat together after the meeting. Isobel had joined Chastity for a tour of her suite. “Everything on track?”
“More than on track,” Henry said. “We uploaded the new version with subscriptions and forums. Subscriptions are a little slow coming in, but they’re picking up. We’re running four servers out at Page Services now and it looks like we’ll see our first 10,000 hit day by the end of the year.”
“That’s cool. Why so many servers?”
“Speed mostly. And redundancy. The search engine continues to uncover new sources of content based on keywords in what has already been found or based on what people have asked it. Once the content is found, it has to be included in the AI training. It’s becoming quite sophisticated in its responses,” Henry said.
“Her,” Luke said. “I know it’s just a computer program, but Isobel insists Pythia is a woman giving out women’s wisdom.”
“I really hate to think women’s wisdom is a random selection of vague statements generated from ancient sources,” Henry said. “I’ll try to remember to refer to it as her when I’m around Izzy.”
“Seriously, 10,000 hits in a day is some significant traffic. Isn’t there any way we can use that to drive sales of Forever Yours?”
“We will. Izzy’s idea of putting ‘Powered by Open Cloak AI’ on the screen was good. We added our web address with a link to the Forever Yours landing page. We’re already seeing traffic referred by the link, even though we haven’t started sales yet. It’s going to be interesting.”
“Here’s to more interest, if not interesting times,” Luke chuckled, tapping his pop can against Henry’s.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
