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"You there?"
Ryan was staring at his computer when Patricia's voice came through the door again. He hurried over and opened it.
"Patricia. Why are you here again?"
"I have news for you. You didn't pick up your phone again."
"It's on silent. Couldn't someone else just relay an ordinary message?"
"Who exactly would I trust to come into your dorm?" Patricia said. "Right now you can't afford to lose a single sheet of scratch paper out of here."
"Fair enough." Ryan didn't mind. Ever since the Crimson Typhoon project was announced, his dorm had indeed been under lockdown.
"What's the news?" He sat back down at his computer and started clattering away at the keyboard, asking Patricia over his shoulder.
She stood behind him. "Leadership asked me to ask whether you're willing to do an interview. If you're up for it, we'll arrange a sit-down in a few days for use in the project's documentary."
"Sure." Ryan wasn't going to refuse that.
Patricia sighed. For those two syllables, exactly as expected, she'd had to loop all the way around the new base's construction site to get here.
"What are you researching lately?" She looked at Ryan's screen.
Ryan kept his focus on the computer. "I've been interested in artificial intelligence lately. It's not that hard, so I've been squeezing out a little time to work on it."
"Those GPU servers you procured for me earlier went toward this." He pointed at the computer.
The servers he'd requested had arrived on the third day after he submitted the requirements and been installed in the room next door, the one Chloe used to stay in during her visits.
He'd paid for them with his own salary and stipend, of course. The project was currently his personal research alone, and public and private accounts had to stay separate.
People online liked to say that broke people had no business doing deep learning. Ryan didn't actually know how much his stipend amounted to, but he probably wasn't a broke person, so the servers had been an easy purchase.
After moving into the new place, the neural network's deep learning progress had been very fast.
"Oh? Mind if I take a look?" Patricia's interest was piqued.
"Look all you want." Ryan didn't care in the slightest. As long as the viewer wasn't a domain expert, anyone could watch. There was no way to extract his technology just from the interface.
On his computer was a simple interactive interface. An input box, with an upload icon beside it. Beneath the surface of the page, you could see lines of running program code streaming past at high speed, looking like the kind of effect that showed up constantly in sci-fi films.
This was the artificial intelligence he'd been building in his spare time.
He'd written it by hand over this period, on the foundation of the system's documentation, taking only the essential and usable parts of the material and discarding everything that wasn't useful for now. That was how he'd trimmed the code, which had originally been bloated to a degree he found intolerable, down to a range he could accept, after which he'd ground away for several more days to finish the thing.
The earlier neural network had now been ported onto it.
"What can this thing do? If I talk to it, will it answer?" Patricia looked at the extremely simple interface. She didn't know much about artificial intelligence and was genuinely curious, especially curious about an AI that Ryan had made.
"It won't. It's still in natural-language training right now. Learning to respond will probably take a while longer."
"As for what it does, let me give you a demonstration."
Ryan thought for a moment, then clicked the upload icon and uploaded a photo of a small dog walking beside a heart-shaped pool. Half a sun umbrella was visible at the edge of the pool.
After uploading, he typed "dog" into the input box and pressed Enter.
A loading icon popped up. Before the spinner had completed even a single rotation, it vanished.
Then, on the photo he'd just uploaded, the small dog walking along had been cleanly cut out. The cropped image of the dog, lifted from the high-resolution photo, had lost none of its image quality. It looked perfectly sharp.
This was the primary function of the AI he'd created so far.
Image extraction based on a deep neural network.
"Huh? That's what it does?" Patricia was surprised.
Unlike before, what surprised her wasn't the power of the AI's function, but, how should she put it, it looked a little low-rent.
The trouble was that Ryan had left too deep an impression on her before. Every move he made was era-defining technology, and now the AI he'd built had only this one function, which made for too jarring a contrast.
"Ahem." Ryan was, unusually, a little embarrassed.
"Don't read too much into it. This is only the very beginning. Crimson Typhoon can't be built in a day either. We need to give it some patience. And even as it is, its function is already quite powerful."
Patricia caught herself and rushed to make amends. "Now that I think about it more carefully, this function does have considerable uses. At the very least it'd be useful in graphic design. Is this your original creation?"
"No. Similar applications already exist on the market," Ryan said, shaking his head.
"..." Patricia decided to stop talking for a while.
Ryan was right. This application direction wasn't his original creation. Similar examples already existed online. You uploaded a photo, and with the help of an AI, you could extract an object's image from the photo, commonly called cutting out, or automatically erase the background and keep only the main subject.
"My AI does have a number of advantages over comparable applications on the market, though."
As he spoke, Ryan deleted the extraction result and re-uploaded the dog photo. This time he changed the target.
"umbrella."
Enter.
A second later, the sun umbrella at the edge of the heart-shaped pool, of which only half was visible, was immediately extracted.
Like the previous result, the umbrella's image had not the slightest distortion. Even under strong light, there were no problems with ragged edges or missing or extraneous portions of the image.
Patricia watched with full concentration. She seemed to be catching on to something.
Ryan deleted the result and repeated the operation once more, except this time he typed "pool." Unsurprisingly, the portion extracted this time was the pool.
This time even Ryan was a little impressed.
The dog and the umbrella he'd asked for earlier had obvious, distinct features. The pool was a different matter.
First, the pool's shape was a heart, which, compared to an ordinary rectangular pool, made its features more hidden. Second, determining the pool's boundary was a problem of its own.
Did the pool include its rim or not? If so, how far out should it extend? Especially with an irregularly shaped pool like this one.
In this extraction, the entire heart-shaped pool's edge had been preserved beautifully. Compared against the original image, not a bit too much and not a bit too little. It didn't look the slightest bit off.
Beside him, Patricia was likewise astonished to the extreme.
"Your AI's recognition can reach this level of precision?"
She wasn't familiar with artificial intelligence, but even she could infer the difference in difficulty between recognizing an object with a relatively fixed form and recognizing an object that was more of a concept.
A dog and an umbrella obviously had relatively fixed forms. A pool was a word that leaned more toward a concept, without a fixed form.
To recognize both of these, the difficulty involved was clearly on entirely different levels.