53: Chapter 53 Hello, Qiming.

Gray's finger hovered over Old Qian's name in his phone contacts; after hesitating for a few seconds, he finally pressed down firmly.

The call connected, and the familiar roar of machine tools and the sound of keyboard tapping drifted from the background.

"Hello? Old Gray? Is the sun rising from the west? Looking to grab a drink with me?"

Old Qian's voice carried a hint of teasing. He was Gray's university classmate and currently worked in the technical department of a medium-sized auto parts manufacturing plant, serving as one of Gray's few insiders in the industrial circle.

"There's plenty of time for drinks, Old Qian. I'm calling to ask you about something serious!"

Gray tried his best to make his voice sound casual, but his slightly rapid breathing betrayed him.

"Has your factory... been using a domestic industrial AI lately? One called enlightenment?"

There was silence on the other end for two seconds before Old Qian's voice suddenly spiked with a nearly fanatical excitement.

"enlightenment?! More than just using it! I'm telling you, Old Gray, this thing is currently the ancestor of our factory! We folks in process optimization are just short of burning incense for it!"

Gray's heart skipped a beat instantly, and he gripped his phone tighter.

"Is it... is it really that good?"

"Good?! It's god-tier!"

Old Qian's voice was like a burst dam.

"You have no idea! Before, when we did parameter optimization, we had to laboriously run models, feed data, and debug for months without necessarily seeing an improvement of even a few points!

Now? Just toss the requirements and data to enlightenment. Its interfaces are as plentiful as an octopus's tentacles; it can analyze, model, and produce a plan all by itself! Speed? It's at least three times faster than that old jalopy of a foreign system we used before! The response speed is terrifyingly fast!

The official report says the performance is only 15% better than the top foreign ones? Bullshit! I suspect they've seriously understated it! Conservative! Too conservative!"

Old Qian's rapid-fire description was like a shot of adrenaline, instantly igniting all of Gray's desires.

He felt his throat go a bit dry, and his voice carried a slight tremor.

"Old Qian... that... that API... how did you guys get it? Can... can people on the outside get a hold of it?"

The other end of the line went silent instantly. Even the roar of the machine tools seemed to be deliberately muffled.

Several seconds passed before Old Qian's voice sounded again, carrying an unprecedented level of seriousness and caution.

"Old Gray, why are you asking this? The API? That's our lifeblood! The company only has one, and it's bound tight! The management is incredibly strict!

It requires corporate qualification certification and layers of approval. Only after passing do they grant a dedicated key, and the backend monitors everything throughout! If there's even a slight anomaly in the calls—

Like a sudden surge in traffic or an incorrect access source—

They'll lock you out immediately! And if it's locked, then what? The entire factory's production line optimization would grind to a halt! Who could bear that responsibility?"

He paused, his tone softening slightly, though it still carried a warning.

"I know you do AI reviews, but this is an industrial AI! It's a completely different beast from things like CloseAI that chat and draw pictures! Its core isn't designed for that!

You want to turn it into a chat AI? How many layers of wrappers would you have to put on it, and how much conversion code would you have to write? That workload... could you even handle it?

Besides, the risk is too high! Once a non-industrial use call is detected, our factory's API is definitely toast! Brother, it's not that I won't help you, but this... it's just not possible."

Old Qian's words were like a bucket of cold water poured over him. Gray's newly ignited flame was mostly extinguished.

He understood; it wasn't that Old Qian wasn't being a friend, but that this enlightenment was locked away in the inner chambers of industry by the state with the most stringent shackles, guarded heavily so that outsiders couldn't even dream of touching it.

Behind every API was the lifeblood of an enterprise.

"Should I just give up like this?"

Gray looked at enlightenment's simple and cold logo on the computer screen, a strong sense of unwillingness surging in his chest.

He felt as if, behind that cold logo, the answer he had been searching for so long was hidden.

A truly powerful AI core belonging to the Chinese people!

He couldn't give up!

He took a deep breath, his gaze becoming sharp.

Since Old Qian's route was a dead end, he would find someone higher up!

He leveraged all the connections and resources he had accumulated as a blogger with millions of followers, searching like a bloodhound for information on company executives who held enlightenment API permissions.

One company, two, three... He meticulously drafted earnest emails, highlighting his follower count and influence, repeatedly emphasizing his love and eager anticipation for domestic AI, hoping to gain an opportunity for a review and promotion to justify the 'Glory of Domestic Products.'

The emails vanished like stones dropped into the ocean.

Phone calls were politely declined.

Once, a company's PR head even sneered after hearing his request.

"Mr. Gray, we are in precision manufacturing, not entertainment live-streaming. enlightenment is a production tool, not a toy."

Then, they hung up the phone without mercy.

Each rejection felt like a cold needle pricking his heart.

Gray sat at his computer surrounded by peripherals, watching the sky outside darken. A massive sense of frustration nearly overwhelmed him.

Was he really destined to just watch from across a screen as the foreign 'Light of Humanity' shone, while he didn't even have the chance to touch the dawn that belonged to his own people?

Just as he was about to lose heart and prepare to shut down the computer, his inbox suddenly 'dinged' with a new email notification.

The sender had an unfamiliar company suffix, and the subject line was just a few simple words.

[RE: Inquiry Regarding enlightenment AI Review Collaboration]

Gray's heart leaped, and he opened the email with trembling fingers.

The content was brief and the phrasing very official:

Mr. Gray:

We have received your expression of interest in reviewing and promoting the "Qiming Intelligent Manufacturing Engine" used by our company.

Following an internal evaluation, we believe that exploring the application of generative AI is also an important part of human-computer interaction and knowledge assistance in industrial intelligent upgrades, and possesses a certain degree of project feasibility.

Our company can arrange for a technical team to develop a demonstration interface (Demo) with basic conversational functions based on the core capabilities of the enlightenment platform, and package it as a simple application.

This Demo is for your review and demonstration purposes only; the data source is a public network knowledge base, not our company's production data, and access permissions will be strictly limited and monitored.

The review content must be finalized and approved by us before publication.

If there are no objections, please confirm. Our technical lead will follow up with you regarding specific details.

Best regards.

XX Intelligent Equipment Co., Ltd. | Technical Project Department | Manager Wang

"It's a go?!"

Gray suddenly sprang from his chair, pacing around in excitement and punching the air!

Although the other party's words were high-sounding, forcing generative AI into being an 'important part of industrial intelligent upgrades,' that didn't matter!

The important thing was that he had secured his ticket!

Even if it was just a wrapped, feature-limited Demo, it meant he could finally touch the core of enlightenment with his own hands!

"Confirm! Confirm immediately!"

Gray practically shouted as he replied to the email, fearing the other party might regret it the next second.

For the next few days, time crawled for Gray.

He was like a child waiting for exam results, unable to sit still.

Finally, on a sweltering afternoon, an unfamiliar cloud drive link and an extraction code appeared in his inbox.

The note contained only one line of text.

[enlightenment-Interactive Demo V0.1.apk]

This was it!

Gray held his breath, his fingers trembling slightly from over-excitement as he practically snatched the dozens-of-megabytes APK file and downloaded it to his phone.

The notification for the completed transfer chimed, and he couldn't wait to click install.

The installation process was unusually fast, without any fancy splash animations.

An extremely crude icon appeared on his phone's home screen.

On a plain white background was a deep blue, abstract enlightenment logo outlined in lines, without even a name.

Gray took a deep breath, as if he were about to open a long-buried treasure; with a mood akin to a pilgrimage, he tapped the icon.

The screen lit up.

There was no login screen, no user guide, and no settings options.

What met his eyes was only an empty, plain white chat window occupying most of the screen.

At the bottom of the window was an equally simple, narrow text input box.

Beside the input box was a solitary, blue send button.

Crude.

Utterly crude.

So crude it was almost pathetic.

It was a world apart from CloseAI's high-tech interface and its wealth of functional buttons.

It was like a top-tier supercar engine crudely stuffed into the shell of a tricycle.

Yet, as Gray looked at that blinding white and the solitary input box, his heart pounded uncontrollably, his blood seemingly roaring through his veins.

All the anticipation, all the hardships, and all the rejections condensed into this tiny input box at this moment.

He knew that behind this interface, crude to the point of being primitive, was likely the very core of enlightenment—the one that had stirred the entire industrial world and was upheld by the power of the state.

A corner of that cold, powerful silicon-based intelligence, bound by layers of shackles.

His trembling finger hovered over the virtual keyboard on the phone screen.

Countless questions swirled in his mind; finally, he took a deep breath and, with a nearly pious sense of testing, typed out the first question:

"Hello, enlightenment. Can you understand... the beauty of Chinese?"