Network Builders: a Record of the Secret Battle of AI Entrepreneurship

In the spring of 2023, ChatGPT took the world by storm. Lin Yuan, Chen Kai, and Xia Zhiyao founded "Ark Intelligence" in a moldy incubator in Zhongguancun. They soon discovered that this road was a hundred times crueler than they imagined - the computing power for training the model burned through 20,000 yuan a day, and the company account only had 80,000 yuan left. What is more fatal is not the lack of money, but the rules themselves: giants use "technological inclusiveness" to package monopolies, capital uses gambling clauses to weave a cage, and H100 chips are detained indefinitely. The only thing they can do is to build their own web in someone else's web. From the afternoon when we received a US$200 million acquisition offer from a major manufacturer, to the early morning when we decided to rewrite everything on the domestic Ascend chip; from the late-night technical challenges in the open source community, to the last 72 hours of the countdown to algorithm registration - this is the story of a group of technical young people using engineering resilience to fight their way out in the midst of computing power monopoly and capital strangulation. "It's not elegant, but it's alive." Lin Yuan wrote in the code comments at 5 o'clock in the morning. The book runs through real events such as the release of GPT-4, the Battle of 100 Models, and the stunning debut of DeepSeek. However, they are not news backgrounds, but the line of numbers on the screen when the characters were awakened by the server alarm at three in the morning. Cold realism is intertwined with black humor, without being sensational or watery. "We are just building our own network in other people's networks." This line, from a soliloquy in the computer room to a speech at the annual AI summit, constitutes a spiritual footnote for a generation of technological innovators to find freedom amid constraints.