Chapter 281: Radius Chatter
The next few weeks were a whirlwind of activity. The Radius 10K team, with help from Madison and Rina, created their AI services and Horizon VR headset integration. Horizon and Jenson Manufacturing rushed to get the factory and assembly line established. And Jack’s girls helped him ’christen’ every room and surface in his new mansion.
When Radius 10K went live, they didn’t make any noise. Not officially, anyway. Instead, on the day their website went live, a few hundred ’people’ made posts on various social media platforms.
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In a forum dedicated to esoteric programming languages:
codergod69: "OMG! Have you guys tried out the new Radium model?"
brainfudge42: "Nah. Why bother? If it can’t understand Brainfuck, it’s not worth using."
fplangsrule: "Never heard of Radium. Is it any good?"
codergod69: "Good?!! I used it to vibe-code a Haskell to BF compiler. In Rust!"
brainfudge42: "Bullshit! Link or STFU!"
codergod69: "Link ->
fplangsrule: "Seriously?! That’s... hold on, taking a look now."
Several minutes later.
brainfudge42: "Holy shit! It works. The code is ugly. I would fire anyone who tried to submit a PR with that shit in it. But damn, it actually works."
fplangsrule: "Interesting. It’s not complete, and doesn’t support any of the advanced syntax and only some of the standard library, but still, impressive for a dumb language model."
codergod69: "Yeah, on its own it’s not impressive and, as bf42 said, the code is ugly. But what is impressive is that Radium is the first model to actually succeed. I use the same prompt with every new model that comes out, and Radium is the first model to succeed!"
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In a forum frequented by software engineers:
wageslave98: "Guys, I think I’m in love!"
id10tkicker: "Is it Evalyn Tanner? I bet it’s Evalyn Tanner. Her latest promo clip just dropped and just... mmmm. So yummy."
wageslave98: "Nah man, Radium just saved my life! My boss has been on my ass for two weeks to solve this problem, and this one bug just would not go away. So, I used this new code review service offered by Radius 10K using their new Radium model. Ten minutes and less than a credit and it found the damned bug!"
kevincodes: "Must not have been a hard problem if an LLM solved it in ten minutes."
wageslave98: "Fuck you kc. I’ve spent hundreds of credits trying every damned code-friendly model out there, and none of them helped. It was a fucking race condition! And subtle. Even my manager was surprised when I submitted the PR."
gogod23: "Wait. Are you telling us this new Radium model found a subtle race condition in your code?"
wageslave98: "That’s the best part. It wasn’t my code! The bug was in thinks-his-code-is-perfect Martin’s code! It was just my changes that triggered the bug. The look on Martin’s face during our last standup was priceless."
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In a forum focused on running AI locally:
llamaherder: "Have any of you tried the new Karl models that just popped up? They seem almost too good to be true."
albertisanoob: "Yes! I just downloaded their CodeStation plugin. It rocks. They have a code completion model that actually runs on my laptop! And it seems to be about as good as the AI-n-stein’s proprietary model. No more paying 20 credits a month to generate boilerplate code."
procodehattip: "Their open source stuff is amazing. And super easy to install. And they even support my off-brand GPU! They even provide a local document indexing service that integrates with local chat. On a lark, I asked it an esoteric question from my PhD days, and it was able to find the answer in a notes file buried deep in an old class notes folder."
datascifi: "I second pcht’s endorsement. That document-indexing service really works! And it’s fast. Well, fast for what it does. It still took two days to index all my docs. But it cranks out search results faster than I expected."
llamaherder: "But is it good enough to ditch AI-n-stein?"
albertisanoob: "Hell yes! I haven’t spent a single centi-cred on AI-n-stein since I installed their CodeStation plugin."
procodehattip: "Yes. It’s just as good as AI-n-stein’s best models and, best of all, it’s free!"
datascifi: "I’ve been struggling to figure out how to finish my research on the budget I have, but with the open-source models and software from Radius 10K, I might actually be able to afford something other than cheap noodles in a cup!"
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In an office on the tenth floor of the AI-n-stein building, a standup meeting was in progress.
"...still don’t know why we’re showing a 20% drop in requests. There’s nothing in any of the logs that would indicate a problem. Our request response times are actually up because of the drop in request volume," said a man wearing glasses, an AI-n-stein t-shirt, and jeans.
"Does anyone have any ideas?" asked an older man in a light blue dress shirt with rolled up sleeves.
"Um, I might have something," said a young woman hesitantly.
The man in glasses rolled his eyes, but the man in the dress shirt said, "Go a head Shelly."
"This new company, Radius 10K, just appeared a few days ago, and there’s been lots of chatter about their open-source models on the forums," said the young woman.
"Oh, I head about them," said another man. "One of my friends is a big Haskell fan. He said he saw their new service mentioned on a few forums. One poster even claimed to have vibe-coded a Haskell to Brainfuck compiler in Rust."
"That’s hard to believe," someone said.
"I was skeptical as well. But the same person also posted a link to the code, along with the prompt he used. The code works. It’s ugly, but it works."
"I find it hard to believe that we lost 20% of our volume to a new competitor in only a few days," said the man in the dress shirt.
"Um, sir," said the young woman, "from what I’ve been reading in the forums, lots of people are switching to running Karl, Radius 10K’s open-source model, locally on their own systems. I, um, I ran their open-source model through our internal test suites."
"Oh? How’d it do?" ask the man in the dress shirt.
"It’s average across all test suites was two percent higher than our best internal model."
"What?!" exclaimed the man in glasses. "How is that possible? You must have done something wrong."
The man in the dress shirt frowned. "Henry, run the tests again. I’m not doubting Shelly’s work, but we need to be sure. Because... if this is true, we have a problem. A serious problem."