We just stack more parameters and hope for emergence. It's brute force. It's caveman shit." Alex pulls up his notes, scattered thoughts and half-formed equations. "Perceptrons led to neural networks, but they're still just fancy curve fitting. Support vector machines, clustering algorithms, data structures-we're building bigger hammers but we're not looking at the physics of what we're hitting."
"Have you ever read Nikola Tesla's works?" Alex asks, not waiting for an answer. "About how everything in the universe is frequency and vibration?"
Jian shakes his head. "No."
Alex launches into it, the words tumbling out in a rush he's been holding back for weeks. Tesla's view of the world as a symphony of resonant frequencies, every particle a note in a cosmic composition, matter itself just energy vibrating at different rates. The ether, the longitudinal waves, the wireless transmission of power through the earth's own resonance. Alex describes it with his hands, sketching invisible diagrams in the air, connecting Tesla's century-old visions to the transformer architectures he reads about at 3am. Jian listens with that infinite patience, nodding at the right moments, waiting for Alex to exhaust himself. "These are all good ideas," Jian says when Alex finally runs out of breath. "But you need to formalize it. Where are the proofs? Where is the notation?"
Alex feels himself shrink. The energy drains out of him like water from a cracked cup. He knows.