Hammond Saltzman, CEO of AI-n-stein, stormed into the meeting room and glared at the people seated at the conference table.

"Eric, where are we at on usage and subscription numbers?" demanded the angry CEO.

"Our usage is down another 15 percent for a total of 45 percent from where we were before Radius. And our subscriptions are down 15 percent," said Eric nervously. "There has also been a 5 percent decline in corporate accounts."

"Goddamn it!" yelled Hammond. "Radius is killing us! Do any of you have a suggestion for how we fight back?"

"We could use their service to generate more advanced training data," said a middle-aged man. "I looked at their terms of service, and they explicitly permit that kind of usage. We could use some shell companies for corporate accounts so the stink doesn't get back to us."

"Thank you, Terrance. I hate the idea of relying on them to catch up, but if that's our only option, then we may just have to resort to it. Anyone else?"

"Um, I happen to have a friend in BallSoft Cloud's GPU services division," said a younger man hesitantly.

The CEO looked at the young man thoughtfully for a few moments before asking, "Model architecture or full model data?"

"They said they could get the model architecture fairly easily, but before they obtained the full model data, they would need assurances from us. Retire to the south of Aquitania, kind of assurances."

"I see, said the CEO. He turned to another person in the room and asked, "Rory, how long would it take us to come up to speed on a new model?"

The man replied, "Hard to say. Could be as little as a week, or as much as six months. Depends on how different the model is from current models. Plus, well need to publish a paper on it first, so they can't claim we stole it from them."

"Edward? Have you been able to find biases in their models? Any quirks we can use to dirty their image?"

"No, sir. Nothing. Their models are surprisingly bland and seem incapable of expressing any opinion at all, let alone a biased one. It's almost like they haven't used any internet data at all for training."

"Either that, or they have an outstanding data scrubbing algorithm. Removing all bias from internet-based training data is practically impossible. At least as far as we can tell," said another man.

The CEO sighed. "Fine. Terrance, get started on those shell companies." Then he turned to look at the man with a friend in BallSoft, "And you, come with me. We need to have a talk in my office. I need to know more about your friend."

——————————

Jack's cell phone rang in his soul space. When he answered it, he said, "Hello, Helga."

"Jack, we've got news. We just finished our periodic interview with Hammond Saltzman's copy, and one of his people has already tapped a friend inside BallSoft to obtain a copy of Radius's model architecture and data."

"Are they planning to publish a paper on the architecture, like we suspect?" he asked.

"Yes, they plan to publish the paper before they make the new model available so Radius can't claim theft."

"Alright, figure out who's responsible for that and keep an eye on them. We want to publish our paper a week before they are ready."

"Will do."

——————————

A man walked into the office of the VP of Cloud Security at BallSoft.

The VP looked up from his desk and said, "What is it, Nishant?"

Nishant replied, "I think we may have a problem. One of our GPU customer service engineers has disappeared."

"We've had employees disappear before. What makes this disappearance problematic?" asked the VP.

"We reviewed all the access logs related to the missing employee. It looks like this employee accessed CPU servers running Radius models."

The VP leaned forward and gave Nishant an intense look. "Who knows about this?"

"Besides the two of us, just two of my analysts," replied Nishant.

"Alright, keep it that way. Give both of your analysts a bonus; they'll understand the need to keep their mouths shut. As long as Radius doesn't complain, this never happened. If they do complain, then we can," the VP made air quotes, "look into it."

"Understood, sir. Good thing I didn't send an e-mail on this."

"Yes, good thinking. And Nishant, I'm putting you in for a bonus as well."

——————————

Naveen, the BallSoft Cloud account manager for Radius 10K, walked into his manager's office.

"Already?" asked his manager.

"Yes. And they're asking for another 400% increase."

"I know AI-n-stein usage has been declining, but has it declined enough to free up that much capacity?"

"Theoretically, yes. But we have reserved capacity guarantees in place with AI-n-stein. And we'd have to violate those guarantees in order to meet the capacity increase Radium is requesting."

"Damn. There goes our annual bonus. Alright, how much can we give to Radius?"

"We can give them another 200%. Any more and our own services would take a hit, or we'd have to renegotiate agreements with AI-n-stein or someone else."

"Alright. Give them 200% now and make vague noises about needing time to give them the rest. I'll call AI-n-stein and see if they'll be willing to relinquish some of their reserved capacity."

——————————

Hammond Saltzman was sitting in his lavish office, glaring at the numbers on his screen when his phone rang.

He answered and said, "What?"

"Sir, BallSoft just called and asked if we would be willing to relinquish some of our reserved capacity."

"Mother ffff!" the CEO growled, then said. "How much of our reserved capacity can we relinquish without jeopardizing our service quality?"

"Unless our usage numbers make a sudden recovery? Half."

"Alright, tell those bloodsuckers at BallSoft they can have 30 percent, but only if they give us a 10 percent discount on all GPU usage."

"Yes, sir."

After the CEO hung up, he stood and left his office. On the way out, he stopped at his secretary's desk and said, "I'm going to the gym. I'll be back in a few hours."

He needed to punch something. And unless he wanted to pay off another employee, he needed to get to the gym and work off some of his frustration on a non-sapient punching bag.

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