The lunch quickly drew to a close. Feng Jun was not in a hurry to send Fang Ziqing back to the company for work, so the two of them strolled and chatted in the mall.
Fang Ziqing and Feng Jun had not spent much time together; even including their blind date, this was only their third meeting. Feng Jun didn't mind having an office romance with his employee, but it all depended on whether Fang Ziqing was willing. However, based on their current interactions, things looked promising. Fang Ziqing was very happy to discuss work and even personal matters with Feng Jun, and Feng Jun was happy to listen and respond to her.
But after a while of strolling, Feng Jun noticed that there were always two or three people following them. These people whispered behind Feng Jun, occasionally taking out their phones to photograph Feng Jun and Fang Ziqing. Feng Jun didn't react, pretending not to see them and continuing to stroll with Fang Ziqing.
After a while, Fang Ziqing's phone rang. It was a subordinate from the company's headquarters. Some company matters required Fang Ziqing to return to deal with them. Feng Jun originally wanted Fang Ziqing to put off these trivia, but Fang Ziqing was quite career-driven, so Feng Jun had no choice but to drive her back to the company.
This time, Feng Jun did not park the car above ground but drove directly into the underground parking lot. However, since he had already visited in the morning, the company's security guards had firmly remembered Feng Jun's license plate number. The security guard on duty stood at attention, perfectly straight, afraid of leaving a bad impression on Feng Jun.
After dropping off Fang Ziqing, Feng Jun had nothing else to do. He had few true friends in Shangqing City, and he had long since lost contact with his former colleagues. Han Wenbo was also busy with company matters, so Feng Jun could only drive around Shangqing City by himself.
While Hu Kun was wandering around, several domestic internet giants were already in an uproar. Tencent had gathered all their technical backbone personnel and had been continuously attempting to decrypt and breach the operating procedures and servers of the smart pet for a week. However, as of this afternoon, all their efforts had been fruitless. On the contrary, two veteran employees were hospitalized due to sudden illnesses caused by overtime and staying up late.
Inside the conference room, Pony Ma listened solemnly as his subordinates reported on their work. As a leading internet company in China and even internationally, Tencent's WeChat alone boasted over 1.2 billion users in China, with daily usage exceeding one billion. This didn't even include other social software and various gaming platforms. Last year, the group company's total revenue exceeded 600 billion, and this was under the economic conditions immediately following the pandemic.
Such a company naturally had a professional think tank internally. Although Tencent had not publicly announced research into artificial intelligence, internal arrangements had long been underway. They also had financial dealings, big or small, with multiple domestic AI companies. When smart pets first emerged, Tencent's think tank and executives noticed these two products and immediately dispatched people to conduct research. By coincidence, Pony Ma was also among the first users to purchase a smart pet. After a week of experiencing it, he immediately decided to initiate imitation research on this product. After all, the copy-and-paste method was Tencent's consistent approach.
However, in today's report meeting, Pony Ma heard no useful progress. Whether it was physical disassembly or network and program attacks, Tencent had made no breakthroughs. The internal programs of the smart pet had an architecture unlike any other on the market, and Sun and Moon Technology Company's servers also had the same firewall. After several days, not only had they gained nothing, but they had also lost two programmers.
After listening to his subordinates' reports, Pony Ma did not rush to speak but fell into quiet contemplation. The managers and supervisors sitting on both sides had already begun to discuss in low voices. They were all amazed at how this newly emerging company had compiled and manufactured such a perfect product. It seemed unrelated to all other industries, yet it brought tremendous shock to the entire digital industry.
Finally, after a period of thought, Pony Ma spoke: "First, send personnel to contact Sun and Moon Technology Company to see if we can reach their core personnel. If conditions permit, use headhunting firms to try and poach one or two people from their company. Also, collect all information related to this company's management. I don't want information from the internet; all data must be authentic. Finally, pay close attention to Sun and Moon Technology's financial movements. If there's an opportunity, find a way to lend them money in Tencent's name, and ideally, find a way to purchase their shares."
Pony Ma quickly finalized the specific next steps for Sun and Moon Technology. As the head of Tencent for over a decade, he had already sensed that the future internet industry was about to undergo a reshuffle, and this reshuffle would likely originate from Sun and Moon Technology Company.
The same thing happened at Baidu. CEO Li, the company's founder, was also holding a similar meeting. Unlike Pony Ma's composure, CEO Li was furious with his team of programmers and their leaders. As China's largest search engine company and a pioneer in AI technology, especially in autonomous driving, speech recognition, and deep learning, Baidu had launched the Wenxin Yiyan search engine in recent years and successively introduced various intelligent driving engines with new car manufacturers, making it a leading player in China's AI industry.
It was precisely because Baidu had gone quite far in the AI field in recent years that CEO Li and his company's leadership understood how terrifying Sun and Moon Technology's smart pet program was. A program that could completely mimic cats and dogs, not only capable of automatic following, running, avoiding, and interacting with people, but also able to sacrifice itself to save its owner when nearby human lives were in danger. Moreover, according to publicly available data, all smart pets use low-end processors like the i3-9300. In comparison, not only is Baidu's AI completely unable to achieve this level, but Baidu also needs to import a large number of specialized computing graphics cards from abroad each year to meet its own AI's computing power requirements.
Baidu noticed the threat of smart pets earlier than Tencent and immediately responded. This included immediately establishing a corresponding R&D department and purchasing a large number of smart cats and dogs for disassembly and reverse engineering. But despite investing more than Tencent, they, like Tencent, had no breakthroughs.
Looking at the several silent technical department managers, CEO Li almost threw the documents in their faces.
"I don't care what methods you use. I'm giving you two months. You must produce a product that can compete with Sun and Moon Technology Company's smart pet. Otherwise, in two months, everyone in the technical department, including you managers, will have your salaries cut by 50%."
