Besides the Model, There Is You

If this is an AI-themed coming-of-age novel, then the most interesting thing about it is not AI, but "writing life as machine learning." When programmers start dating, even love turns into gradient descent Many novels like to write programmers as wooden people. This book is different. Zhang Wenjun is not a piece of wood, he just sees the whole world as a model. On a blind date, others talk about horoscopes, but he talks about Embedding. When others talk about love, they talk about feelings, but he talks about attention. Others are worried that the relationship is inappropriate, but he carefully analyzed that the learning rate is too high and easy to diverge. The most outrageous thing is that you clearly know that he is talking nonsense seriously, but you feel that- It seems to make sense. When I read the chapter about blind date, I laughed almost the whole time. "Currently belongs to the test set." "More data is needed to establish Embedding." "Loss Function is modified to long-term happiness." "I hope our model will not stay in the first round of training." If these lines are placed in other novels, there is a high probability that they will appear blunt. But when it comes to Zhang Wenjun, he looks like an engineer who has been overtrained by deep learning. It's not that he doesn't know how to be romantic. He just translated romance into machine language. The most interesting thing is that Shen Qing actually understood it. So the love between two top students gradually turned into a two-way process of updating the world model. The biggest feature of this book is that it can always turn seemingly boring technical concepts into life principles that ordinary people can understand. Overfitting becomes a cognitive limitation. Generalization ability becomes growth ability. Noise becomes a life experience. The feedback mechanism becomes a way of getting along with people. Even blind dates have been interpreted as a cognitive exercise. You will find that the author seems to have been telling readers: Machine learning is not computer science. Machine learning is actually life. What really surprised me was Shen Qing's line. Originally I thought it was just a lighthearted and funny blind date plot. The result suddenly cuts into neuroscience, information theory, free energy principle, and intermittent reinforcement. From "Why bad boys are easy to fool", all the way to "The brain is essentially a prediction machine". As you read, you will have a very strange feeling: This is not like the characters in the novel growing up. It's more like the author is studying human beings with a magnifying glass. The best thing is that the author does not write these theories as preaching. But it is hidden in the character's experience. So while you were reading the story, you were suddenly hit by a certain sentence. For example: > The biggest regret in life is not that you kissed the wrong person for the first time, but that you didn't know why you kissed the wrong person until 30 days later. For example: > A truly mature person does not insist that the world is wrong, but dares to admit that his own model is wrong. This way of writing is easy for people to resonate with. Because everyone has at some stage discovered that their "world model" has failed. Emotions are like this. This is the case. The same is true in life. The DeepFlow company part is like the utopia of many technical people. No attendance. No performative overtime. Mistakes are allowed. Encourage research on useless things. Believe in psychological safety. Believe in knowledge redundancy. Believe in interdisciplinary collision. If many Internet novels describe "996", then this book is more like describing: "What would happen if a group of people who truly love technology had an ideal working environment?" Overall, the biggest charm of this book is threefold: First, it is understandable. Even if you don't understand AI, you can still understand the story. Second, learn it. Machine learning, neuroscience, psychology, complex systems and other knowledge are dismantled in a popular and interesting way. Third, there is temperature. It discusses technology, but it always discusses people. Discuss growth. Discuss cognitive upgrades. Discuss the subtle attraction between people. Discuss how to become a better version of yourself. If the following chapters can continue to maintain this style of "hard core knowledge + light humor + character growth", then this book is likely to become a very special existence: A coming-of-age novel cloaked in AI. A novel that talks about deep learning as love, neuroscience as life, and makes programmers look a little cute, a little real, and a little romantic. One sentence summary: "Beyond the Model There Is You" is not about teaching AI how to understand humans, but about telling humans how to understand themselves.

The biggest feature of this novel is not "AI" or "entrepreneurship", but the growth of technical people is written in the style of a martial arts novel. I almost laughed when I saw the part about Lin Yuanjin shutting down his phone regularly at the beginning of the chapter. It is a dream for other programmers to get off work. For him, it is like executing Linux system calls. When 18:00 arrives, he will power off directly. This kind of detail is particularly real and expresses the obsessions and boundaries of many technical people. What is even more interesting is that the author does not let the protagonist save the world as soon as he appears, but first lets him meet various "weird people". An online ride-hailing driver explained compound interest in thirty minutes; An Ivy League scholar explained entrepreneurship as solving an NP-complete problem; A mysterious girl put on a standard defensive stance at the scene of a traffic accident; A man with a scar could decide whether to fight or not with a few slang words. These characters seem to come from completely different worlds, but they are like hidden layer nodes in a neural network, changing Lin Yuanjin's life parameters little by little. If traditional cool writing is about "upgrading to defeat monsters", then this book is more like "cognitive upgrade". What I like most is the author's way of expression. We were obviously talking about entrepreneurship, but suddenly we talked about machine learning. We were obviously talking about deep learning, but suddenly we talked about compound interest. We were obviously talking about the workplace, but suddenly we talked about learned helplessness. Obviously I am talking about Jianghu, but I can also talk about Linux, distributed systems and neural networks. Logically speaking, putting so many elements together should be messy, but reading it is surprisingly smooth, like watching a programmer's version of "Dragon", and it feels a bit like "The Three-Body Problem" where the cognition is constantly being refreshed and the world is getting bigger. Many of the ideas in the novel are quite interesting: "Go all out during work hours, and you belong to yourself after get off work." "The biggest difference between ordinary people is not who is smarter, but who persists in the right direction longer." "The more linear the income, the more stable life; the more nonlinear the income, the more exciting life." These sentences are not like chicken soup, but more like a log file summarized by an old programmer after stepping on countless pitfalls. Of course, the biggest suspense at present has also appeared. Is DeepFlow the entrance to the next era? What exactly is Demnet planning? What is the origin behind Qi Zhiwei? Is that online ride-hailing driver really just an online ride-hailing driver? There are also the abnormalities in Tianlang Company discovered by Jiang Yaonian. What kind of hidden clues will it lead to? Reading this, you will have a strong feeling: This is not one person changing his destiny, but a group of masters in different fields who are being pushed to the same time node by some invisible force. If you like pure love stories, this book may not be sweet enough. If you like purely technical writing, this book may not be hard enough. But if you like the cognitive impact of science fiction novels, the sense of group portraits in martial arts novels, and the entrepreneurship and growth from the perspective of programmers, then this book is likely to make you read it in one sitting. After all, the story has just begun. The most dangerous and exciting parts are often hidden outside the training set.

The biggest feature of this novel is not the technical elements such as "AI", "Linux" and "hacking", but that it combines technological idealism, rural China, human relationships and youthful growth. If I were to comment in one sentence: This is a novel about the growth of programmers, but it has the skeleton of a martial arts novel, the flesh and blood of local literature, and the warmth of a youth novel. The most attractive thing in the book is not how smart Zhao Na is, but that her growth trajectory is very immersive. She didn't have a computer, so she went to an Internet cafe to install Linux. She didn't configure it, just studied the underlying principles. She had no resources, so she turned poverty into her own teacher. Many technical novels like to portray "geniuses", but Zhao Na is more like a person who grew out of the soil. She knows Fedora, Shell, TCP/IP, and compilers. But she also remembers her father farming in the fields, selling poplar trees for school fees, and the accident in which she lost her finger. This kind of character has a very special power: Technology allows her to fly far away, and the land allows her to remember where she came from. Chu Suiyang is one of the most interesting characters in the whole book. He doesn't understand Linux. Can't understand fork. Can't understand inode. Don't even know what Fedora is. But he was willing to listen. Because the person who said these things is Zhao Na. This is very true. When I was a teenager, I liked a lot of people, not because of what the other person was saying, but because: "When she talks, her eyes will shine." This sentence can almost become one of the most classic youth lines in the book. Compared with those love stories that are always vigorous and vigorous, this kind: riding a bicycle home, the setting sun shines on the fields, one person is talking about Linux, the other person is listening carefully, it is actually easier for people to remember. There is another very interesting feature in the book: The author writes the hacker spirit into the chivalrous spirit. Linus's: Talk is cheap. Show me the code. It is a technical saying among others. In this book, it became: Zhao Na borrowed money late at night. Lin Yuanjin didn't ask anything. Direct transfer of 100,000. Because: "Now that you have spoken, the reason is enough." This paragraph is very contagious. It connects the trust mechanism, character judgment and loyalty in the geek world. After reading this, you will find: What the author really wants to write about may never be technology. But people. Technology is just the shell. The real core is: How people grow in difficult situations. My father, Zhao Daofen, has the tenacity of traditional Chinese farmers. Chu Suiyang has the passion and recklessness of a young man. Zhao Na has the persistence of knowledge to change her destiny. Lin Yuanjin possesses the calmness and responsibility unique to the geek world. These characters come together to give the novel a strong vitality. Of course, the current chapter also has some obvious characteristics: The advantages are fast pace, full of emotions, and likable characters. You can often read it without stopping. The disadvantage is that some technical explanations are relatively long, sometimes like watching TED talks or technical blogs, which can easily stop the plot temporarily. But for those who like Linux, open source, and programmer culture, this is a unique reading pleasure. Overall, this is not a refreshing book in the traditional sense. It is more like: "It describes the resilience of the struggle at the bottom, the cruelty of the industrial wave, and the almost knight-like determination and warmth when people confront each other." Here is the code. There is growth. There is poverty. Have ideals. There are rivers and lakes. There's also that girl with glowing eyes sitting in front of the Fedora terminal. There is only one thing that readers want to know most: Where will Zhao Na go in the end? For this answer, people can't help but read chapter after chapter.