Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears by William Hertling Page A

The statement wasn’t exactly a lie, but it certainly wasn’t the real reason for the sudden allocation.
    “ Wow, what a fantastic reversal,” Mike said, immediately excited by the possibilities. He forgot about his anger, and paced rapidly back and forth in front of the window, thinking through the implications. “With five thousand servers... We can move on to the next phase of the project, and scale up to limited production levels. We could start bulk processing customer emails in preparation for a public launch.”
    “ Well, I think we should start with Avogadro internal emails,” David suggested. “This way, we won’t adversely affect any customers if anything goes wrong. If we can analyze the internal emails at full volume, I am going to suggest to Sean that we turn this autosuggestion feature on for all Avogadro employees.”
    “ That sounds great. So I’ll forget about the performance issues, and just focus on analyzing the internal emails. This is great news David!” Mike did a little dance on his way out the door.
    * * *
    Mike walked out of his office, and David returned to staring out the window. It certainly was great news that they had received the server allocation. So why were the hairs raised on his back?
    He had sent the email to Gary. That part was true. Then there was that minor detail of ELOPe’s involvement he hadn’t mentioned to Mike. David needed to give ELOPe access to Gary Mitchell’s emails, so that it could analyze them. Then, as it turned out, ELOPe needed access to everyone that Gary had sent or received an email from, so that it could do a proper analysis of the messages.
    He wasn’t surprised at all that Mike had uncovered massive processing going on in the background. Because of David’s usage, ELOPe needed to import a massive number of emails. He had obscured his work by ensuring that it wasn’t part of the normal system logs that were created, but he couldn’t prevent the usage monitors from tracking the CPU load.
    David didn’t know what to say to Mike. Eventually Mike would figure it out. He just hoped it was later rather than sooner. Preferably after their resource problems were solved. David didn’t want anyone, not even Mike, to know he was using ELOPe to get the resources to keep it running. It was integrated into the mail servers, and a bug could, in theory, bring down the entire company’s email. If anything bad happened, David and the project would take some heat for it if it got out. But that wasn’t the real cause for the pit of fear in his stomach.
    No, the real issue was the changes David made to the code during his all-night coding marathon. David went deep into the code for the language analysis model, and put in an overarching directive to maximize the predicted sentiment for any email mentioning the project. The effect was that whenever ELOPe was mentioned in any email, from anyone, or to anyone, inside Avogadro, then ELOPe would automatically and silently reword the email in a way that was favorable to the success of the project.
    The resulting emails were indistinguishable in writing style and language from those written by the purported sender, a testament to the skill of his team. While the analysis module determined goals and objectives from the email, the optimization module used fragments from thousands of other emails to create a realistic email written in a voice very similar to that of the sender.
    David relished the success of the team, and wished he could share with them what they had accomplished. Their project was the culmination of nearly three years of dedicated research and development. It had started with David’s work on the Netflix Prize before he was hired at Avogadro, although even that work had been built on the shoulders of geniuses that had come before him. Then there were eight months of him and Mike laboring on their own to prove out the idea enough to justify an entire team. Finally, during the last eighteen months, an