Divine Artifact in a Scientific World-Chapter 282: Seven Bugs

A BallSoft Cloud account manager walked into his manager’s office. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

"What is it, Naveen?" asked the man’s manager, looking up from his laptop.

"Radius 10K just requested a quota increase."

"Oh? How much?"

"400 percent," said Naveen. "And they offered to pre-pay three months ahead if we were willing to provide dedicated capacity."

"Do we even have that kind of capacity?" asked his manager.

"Two days ago I would have said, maybe. But AI-n-stein’s usage has dropped off a cliff. They’re down 20 percent, and still dropping."

"What?!" blurted his manager. "Are you sure?"

"Yes, I triple-checked and confirmed there are no service or metrics issues."

"We need to figure out what happened," said his manager, sounding distressed. ’They’re our biggest GPU customer, and a 20 percent drop means millions in lost revenue!"

"About Radius, sir? Their quota increase will mostly fill the gap created by AI-n-stein’s drop in usage."

"Approve their request. And let’s hope AI-n-stein’s usage stabilizes or our next bonus will be in jeopardy."

——————————

Ned was walking down the hallway towards his office when he heard Stuart, their latest intern, yell, "YES!"

Ned stopped at the door to the intern office and asked, "What’s all the excitement, Stu?"

"I got an account! They raised their account limits, and I managed to win an account before they ran out."

"Account?"

"Yes! Radius. Their new AI is the GOAT! They’re only letting a few people have accounts because they’re still scaling out and don’t want to ruin the service for existing customers, so they’ve been raising the account limits slowly, and it’s a mad rush every time they do."

"Radius? Huh. Never heard of them. Must be new."

"New?! You bet they’re new. They went live only four days ago. The forums are on fire with people talking about Radius. I’ve been using their open-source model, Karl, for the last two days, and it’s just as good as AI-n-stein’s paid service."

Then the intern grinned madly. "But Radium, the new model Radius uses for their paid service? It’s even better! My friend Terry had been bragging about getting an early account for two days."

"Interesting," said Ned. "Can I borrow your account for a few hours so I can do an evaluation?"

"Sure, no problem," said Stuart, then handed Ned a sticky note with an account name and password.

Ned, as the senior engineer on staff, was responsible for trying every AI service that came out to see if any of them could give their team an edge. So he headed back to his office to see what all the fuss was about.

Three hours later, Ned was in the office of the Director of Engineering, three levels up from his manager.

"Sir, we need to get a corporate account with Radius as soon as possible."

"Is it that good?" asked the director.

"Overall, it’s about 50 percent better than any of the other AI services out there, and it shows. Cleaner code, quicker solutions, able to work with less direction, but that’s not what has me so excited."

"Fifty percent? That’s a significant jump."

"It is, sir, but the real kicker is their code review service. It’s almost as good as me! It’s excellent at finding general coding mistakes and security mistakes and can even spot race conditions! It’s not great for domain-specific stuff, but what it can do is huge."

"So, not good enough to replace you," teased the director.

"No, like I said, it doesn’t understand our business. But what it can do is provide the junior engineers with a pre-check-in code review. If we integrate it into our development pipeline, it will save me at least four hours a day and reduce our security risk."

"Have you tried using it to review existing code?" asked the director.

"Yes. I had it review one of our modules. It found seven bugs. Four of them were potential security bugs. I verified all of them."

The director’s eyes widened. "Seven? In one module?"

"Yes. The only reason I didn’t use it to review the rest of the code base was because I was borrowing our intern’s new Radius account."

"Why didn’t you use your own account?"

"I don’t have one. Radius is slammed with new customers, and they’re only accepting a few thousand new customers each day. It’s a lottery system, and they only have one drawing each day. But they have separate arrangements for corporate accounts."

"Alright. I’ll contact them and see if we can get an account. Good work bringing this to my attention. This AI stuff is moving fast, and if we don’t keep up, we’ll be choking on the dust of those that do."

——————————

Elaine knocked on the door frame of her editor’s office.

Her editor looked up and said, "Elaine, come in, close the door and have a seat."

After Elaine sat, her editor said, "Elaine, I just finished reading your latest submission. It’s an excellent piece, and I intend to publish it after we work through a few revisions I think are needed, but I have to ask, why did you waste so much time editing it?"

Elaine’s editor preferred that first drafts be written fast and loose to get the idea on paper and on her desk for a first review. She didn’t want her writers wasting time polishing first drafts.

"Um, mam, I used a new AI service to do a review. I’ve tried all the AI services, but they all tend to edit the soul out of the text. But this new service was like handing it to a real copy editor. It even added some recommendations as notes!"

"Are you saying you had the AI write your article?" asked her editor sternly.

"No, mam. Here, let me send you the original and the output I got from the AI."

Elaine tapped on her tablet for a few moments.

Her editor’s desktop dinged.

After a few minutes, her editor looked up at Elaine.

"You’re saying an AI did this? Which company?"

"Yes, mam. Radius 10K. They have a general chat service and several specialized services, one of which is text editing. It won’t write your paper, but it will review your paper, fix spelling and grammar, and other copy-editing fixes."

"And best of all," added Elaine, "it won’t make any content changes, but it will add notes with comments and recommendations."

"I see that," said her editor. "I’ll have to give it a try, see if it’s appropriate for general use here."

"Good luck with that," said Elaine. "It took me three days to get an account, and the daily lottery waitlist just keeps growing."