He reads the abstract, his brain waking up for the first time since the semester started. This is what he wants to do. Not study the vaporization of water in a steam turbine, but actually build something that matters. He's been obsessed with machine learning since sophomore year. The idea that you could treat intelligence like a circuit, that you could wire up a mind the way you wire up an op-amp, it's the only thing that ever made sense. If you asked him, he'd say artificial general intelligence is the natural endpoint of evolution. Not because it's inevitable, but because it's the only thing that could ever make sense of the mess we've made. The group chat pings:
JIAN: you see the voss email? ALEX: yeah lol
JIAN: they say if you survive him, you can survive anything
ALEX: not sure i want to survive
JIAN: lmao. wanna study tonite? He types "yeah, just after dinner" and then lets the message hang for a beat. All he really wants is to talk shop, to get into the weeds about neural architectures and edge-case exploits and LLMs that won't melt down after three prompts. But Jian is old-school. Jian wants to pass the class. Jian believes in the process. Alex cracks his knuckles and pulls up the paper again. He can't help it. He needs to know how they did it.