Chapter 51: Discussing Cooperation

The next morning, Zhou Yun woke up naturally as usual. He checked his phone routinely, and there was nothing demanding his attention.

His meeting with the representatives from Xiaomi was scheduled for the afternoon at a café near the hotel, so he still had plenty of time.

Originally, since the other party was the one seeking cooperation, he had not prepared anything.

However, after giving it some thought last night, he realized that he also needed to seek cooperation from them. Consequently, he had no choice but to prepare some materials.

At two o'clock in the afternoon, Zhou Yun arrived at the café on time, carrying his laptop.

At a glance, he spotted two people in business attire sitting at a window table. Zhou Yun walked over with a smile, and the two of them simultaneously stood up and walked toward him.

"Are you Mr. Zhou? I am Wang Li, Director of the Cooperation Department at Xiaomi's AI Research Institute," she said, proactively reaching out her hand to introduce herself. Following closely behind her was a slightly younger man holding a laptop bag. "This is my colleague, Engineer Li, who is responsible for technical evaluation."

"Hello, Director Wang. I am Zhou Yun."

After brief pleasantries, Wang Li cut straight to the chase: "Mr. Zhou, time is precious, so let's get right to the point. We are extremely interested in your model compression technology. According to the code you published, it performed exceptionally well in our internal testing."

Zhou Yun nodded. This came as no surprise; he had made the code public after the NeurIPS acceptance list was released. Given such a massive company, it was hardly strange that they could reproduce his work so quickly.

Although the code was open-source, commercial application still required Zhou Yun's permission. Well-known software like VS and Qt operated on a similar model—free for personal use, paid for commercial use. This was the very reason they had sought out Zhou Yun.

"Let's hear your terms." Since he was here to do business, there was no need to beat around the bush. You pay, I deliver; if an agreement could be reached, great. If not, so be it.

"Previously, you mentioned that you wouldn't grant exclusive authorization, and a one-time buyout is naturally out of the question. Therefore, we have drafted a very sincere cooperation proposal. For the specific optimization modules we develop based on your technology, once applied to our products, we are willing to share the resulting revenue with you through a percentage split."

It was a very common model, and the crux of the matter lay in the percentage figure.

"We can offer you two million as an authorization fee. As for the revenue share, based on the net sales of product lines utilizing your core technology module, we will offer you four percent for the first three years."

Two million for a new technology, especially one whose code was already open-source, was by no means a low one-time authorization fee. It could even be said to have exceeded Zhou Yun's initial expectations.

A four-percent revenue share was also a standard and fair offer in collaborations between large corporations and independent researchers. He had not expected the other party to be so straightforward.

In fact, this pricing had not been determined by Wang Li herself; rather, upper management had made the final call directly. At the time, she had her doubts, considering they could easily have pressured him to lower the price.

However, her leadership had put it this way: "While technology is important, talent is even scarcer. This bit of money is nothing."

Naturally, Zhou Yun had no reason to reject such a partnership: "In principle, I agree with this direction. The specific terms will depend on the contract text."

"Very well. We will have our legal team prepare a draft contract for your review shortly."

"Now that your requirements have been discussed, I'd like to talk about another collaboration. Speaking of which, it's actually somewhat related to your AI assistant."

Wang Li was startled for a moment before quickly adjusting her expression. She was indeed somewhat curious about the other collaboration Zhou Yun mentioned. "Oh? Please go ahead, Mr. Zhou. We are all ears."

"Lately, I've been focusing on the issue of barrier-free interaction in AI assistants, particularly for the visually impaired community," Zhou Yun said as he opened the laptop he had brought with him.

"Although current smartphones are equipped with accessibility features and voice assistants, they are still not very friendly to visually impaired individuals. Especially for those who need to travel, the smartphones they carry with them do not play a significant role. Therefore, I want to design a smart white cane..."

He opened the design sketches he had drawn the previous night: "It can collect information through various sensors, analyze it via the AI assistant on the phone, and finally provide prompts."

The concept was simple enough that even a non-technical person like Wang Li could easily understand it.

Wang Li raised an eyebrow. Usually, young people like Zhou Yun tended to focus primarily on themselves, rarely paying attention to such social issues. Even her own company had only started focusing on this area after growing large and powerful.

"Barrier-free interaction—to my knowledge, our company also has research in this field, right?" She tilted her head and cast an inquiring glance at Engineer Li beside her.

"That's correct. Our R&D department even has visually impaired programmers. We do have some accumulated expertise in this area," Engineer Li replied, while observing the design sketches on Zhou Yun's computer screen.

"Mr. Zhou, your hardware design isn't particularly difficult. In fact, our company's existing production lines could manufacture it. However, meeting your standards places demands on data processing latency, precision, and so on. To be honest, our current AI assistant might not necessarily be able to achieve this. Furthermore, multimodal data processing would increase the parameter size of the existing AI assistant, further compounding the difficulty."

Zhou Yun nodded, realizing they had finally gotten to the heart of the matter: "Engineer Li, I have considered everything you mentioned. Regarding these issues—the problem of model compression—aside from the public algorithms, I possess another approach with superior performance. As for multimodal data processing, I also have some technologies that should be able to resolve these issues."

Engineer Li and Wang Li exchanged glances, both seeing astonishment in each other's eyes. They had known Zhou Yun's identity as a graduate student newcomer before coming here. They had originally thought a NeurIPS paper was already the limit, but it turned out there was an even greater master among them?

"Therefore, what I need is deeper-level permissions for your company's AI assistant. Ideally, my module could be directly embedded into your AI assistant, while you cooperate by performing some optimizations. This should resolve the issues you mentioned above."

Wang Li now somewhat understood her superior's train of thought. This Zhou Yun was truly no ordinary genius.

"Mr. Zhou, you really... keep surprising us. Could you elaborate specifically on the 'compression algorithm with superior performance' and the 'multimodal data processing technology' you mentioned? Of course, if it involves core trade secrets, we understand."

Zhou Yun gave a faint smile: "Of course... not." Even if preliminary cooperation had been reached, he wasn't foolish enough to reveal any more. It was enough to let them know he had the goods in his hands.

"Alright, that was presumptuous of us. However, a basic PoC demonstration is still necessary, otherwise it will be difficult to reach a deeper partnership."

"Moreover, our research department still needs to discuss this internally, and there will inevitably be a strict internal approval process. You should prepare yourself mentally for that."

"Naturally."