Chapter 165 - 123: I Really Don’t Have Time
Monday morning, September 29th.
The first thing Chen Lin did upon arriving at the office was turn on the top-of-the-line desktop computer on his desk and, with practiced ease, log in to the official JAMS website.
After entering his username and password to access the author portal, he saw that the manuscript’s status had quietly changed from [Submitted] to [Under-Review].
’Everything’s going smoothly!’
A weight lifted off Chen Lin’s shoulders.
It seemed Director Guo’s advice had been correct. As the most progressive of the top four journals, with a penchant for groundbreaking research, JAMS really did process manuscripts with incredible speed.
He then logged into his email. Sure enough, an official email from the JAMS editorial office was sitting in his inbox with a standard authorization form attached.
Chen Lin followed the instructions, quickly downloading, filling out, and re-uploading the form to the submission site.
With that done, the next step was the longest and most trying part of the entire process: the peer-review stage.
He would have to wait quietly for some anonymous academic editor or reviewer, in some corner of the world, to find time in their busy schedule to verify the correctness of his forty pages of derivations.
To be honest, Chen Lin himself had no idea how long the process would take.
By academic convention, the more cutting-edge the field and the more significant the conjecture being proven, the longer the review period tends to be.
After all, the less experienced an academic editor was, the more cautious and meticulous they would become when faced with such a potentially significant manuscript. They would want to examine every single symbol under a microscope, refusing to let even the slightest potential logical flaw slip by.
Publishing an erroneous proof wasn’t just some April Fool’s prank. It would severely damage the journal’s century-old academic reputation and make it the laughingstock of the entire mathematics community.
The topic of Chen Lin’s paper, "Manifold Boundary and Hallucination Control in Generative Models," was undoubtedly a tough nut to crack in the red-hot field of artificial intelligence. It was also a key area of focus that top research institutions and tech giants were frantically pouring money into.
Even if it wasn’t on the level of proving a problem of the century like the Riemann Hypothesis or the Hodge Conjecture, its importance was definitely substantial.
However, Chen Lin also knew that he hadn’t directly revealed the final, paradigm-shifting result in this paper: the brand-new generative decoding algorithm based on geometric boundary control, which could be applied to large-scale generative models.
He’d held a little something back, merely proposing a novel computational path toward that final answer.
The core of the paper used advanced mathematical tools and sophisticated methods from various fields to rigorously demonstrate and verify the feasibility and correctness of this path.
In other words, he had provided the treasure map, not the treasure itself.
So, Chen Lin figured that while his paper’s topic was important and its content was profound, it probably wasn’t at the level that would require a reviewer to go into seclusion for a year or more just to review it.
Of course, there was always the off chance it could land in the hands of a top-tier titan of the mathematics world who, if they were in a good mood, might review the whole thing in half a day.
Such a possibility existed, but the probability was so small as to be negligible.
But these things were now out of Chen Lin’s hands.
He stretched, put the matter out of his mind for the time being, and started planning his next steps.
There was progress on the JAMS front, but his own academic research couldn’t stop.
He planned to continue building on this paper, delving into deeper deductions. His goal was to produce his final intended result within a month: a generative decoding algorithm based on geometric boundary control. This algorithm could be applied to large models for text-to-image and video generation, and would significantly reduce the hallucination rate.
Then, at the World Congress of Mathematicians at the end of the year, he would make it the main topic of his academic presentation.
Chen Lin did a quick mental calculation. The conference was still over a month away. After accounting for miscellaneous errands, he should have at least twenty days to focus on his research without interruption.
If he stuck to his established routine of focusing for two and a half hours each day, time shouldn’t be too tight.
Besides continuing his mathematical research, another pressing matter was getting his driver’s license.
He had already passed the first three parts of the driving test with ease.
All that remained was the final, purely theoretical fourth part, which he had already scheduled for the following week.
Chen Lin had already decided. When he went home for the National Day holiday, the first thing he would do was talk to his parents about replacing their family’s clunker, which they had been driving for nearly twenty years.
As for himself, he didn’t have an urgent need for a car to commute, so he wasn’t in a rush.
...
...
「Meanwhile, across the ocean.」
In Los Santos, California, inside a single-family home in a quiet neighborhood, complete with its own private pool.
An Asian man with a scholarly air, wearing gold-rimmed glasses, was deftly stuffing clothes into a suitcase. He spoke apologetically to a guest sitting on the living room sofa.
"I’m sorry, Bob, I really don’t have time. Please find someone else! I just got a call from Jask yesterday. I have to help him test the mathematical capabilities of a new model. My flight leaves in two hours, and I’ll probably be in Silicon Valley for a month before I’m back."
The guest, whom he called Bob, was a balding, middle-aged white man.
Despite the blunt rejection, he showed no sign of displeasure. On the contrary, with a fawning smile, he eagerly stood up and handed the other man a folded shirt.
It was no wonder he was acting this way.
After all, the man standing before him was a "living legend" in the modern mathematics community, the one and only Terence Tao!
A monstrous genius hailed as "the smartest person in the world," who at a young age had already become a Fellow of the Lion Country Royal Society and a foreign associate of the Great Beautiful Country Academy of Sciences.
The Salem Prize, the Fields Medal, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Crafoord Prize, the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics... he had swept up practically every top award in the world of mathematics you could name.
Even though he currently only held a teaching position at UCLA, a university not typically counted among the absolute top-tier institutions in the Beautiful Country, no one would dare question Professor Tao’s academic prowess.
Case in point: just two years ago, for the newly formed generative artificial intelligence working group of the Beautiful Country’s Commander-in-Chief’s technology advisory committee, the top leadership of the Beautiful Country specifically appointed Terence Tao to lead it.
As for Bob, despite holding the title of a JAMS editor, he was, in reality, just a regular editor who had graduated from Stanford University’s journalism department. When it came to mathematics, his knowledge was merely at the level of an enthusiast who had "dabbled in it."
While JAMS was esteemed as one of the four top journals in mathematics, its style was different from the other three, which leaned more traditional and conservative. JAMS had always been distinguished by its pioneering spirit and its focus on research that could set new directions for the field.
For this reason, in an era where the wave of artificial intelligence was sweeping the globe, JAMS was far more willing than the other three top journals to accept submissions related to AI algorithms.