Within two weeks, Henry achieved successful development in his work, though the two weeks went in the twinkling of an eye. He never hurried himself but rather set his mind on focusing solely on delivering quality work with HackerOne. He was doing his intended job within the work process: helping different companies trace probable attacks that might easily assail their systems. With precision and great commitment, he got down to this important job. Within those two weeks, Henry was able to render his services for no less than 20 different companies by offering a really meaningful process of uncovering a wide range of risks, many of them critical or high-level vulnerabilities. Keen eyes and broad experience in the field truly paid off-being of great value.
And it is his relentless effort and determination that earned Henry more than 70,000 dollars as profit. Considering this wasn't the big payoff that he had been looking for in the first place, and considering how much time he was devoted to this process, he realized the vulnerabilities he eventually discovered, although serious in nature, were nowhere near as widespread or significant as the devastatingly bad PayPal breach he had worked on some time earlier. The job offers afterward came plentiful, but very tempting, he didn't give any of those offers even a second thought. He wasn't looking for a normal corporate gig at the time, so to say; he was on a different and rather personal track now.
He instead directed his energies and attention to those very factors that meant most to him: establishing his prestige as a pro and perfecting his talents and capabilities.
Henry was now ranked first on the Newbie ranking leaderboard, his 725 reputation points far away from the second contestant at a mere 410, furthering his feeling of accomplishment. Yet, he knew that was far from over. These reputation points were not just a figure but a sign of how far he had come and the size of his growing presence in the world of cybersecurity.
Henry had also amassed a good number of system points. His skills and the improvement he made were easily calculable through these means, and within the two-week short time, he had gathered a whopping 445 points. He was now at a total of 540, from where he started his work. Henry was quite aware that his earning speed of the useful points was slow in comparison with what he had speculated, but he never worried about it. This told him that once he had a more systematic and effective way, the points would come his way in less time.
When he sat down to go through his stats, the feeling of accomplishment that washed over him was immense, though soured somewhat by a small undercurrent of frustration he couldn't quite ignore. After all, the criteria the system utilized to issue system points were rather strict and demanding. He had acquired the sum of 445 points in what he considered an incredibly short length of time, though thinking of the potential he possessed, he could hardly believe he could do no better than this.
[Name - Henry Miller]
[Age - 20]
[Strength- 6]
[Agility - 7]
[Stamina - 7]
[Intelligence - 14]
[Skills - Game Hacking 101, Epiphanes, Universal compiler(C)]
[Points - 540]
To get mid-level skills, though, he would need at least 10,000 points, and at the rate he was going, that would take him an extremely long period of time to reach that specific goal. He wasn't deterred by that challenge, though he was used to long-term goals by this point in his journey.
He plunged head-first without hesitation into the long list of available skills he could buy. He was bent on finding something that would give him a high edge over everybody else.
It was one of them that caught his attention:
[Basic AI: Master the development of 2100-era artificial intelligence, leveraging compact yet powerful training models and advanced big data integration. 700 Points]
The decision seemed quite rational and well-considered to him. He felt that most probably in a week, or at most in ten days, he'd be able to gain enough points to buy it. A purchase that would exactly serve both his personal interests and professional purposes. Henry fantasized about the many ways this might pay off. An AI that could change market dynamics. It would be reasonably priced, and very effective, and there would be a free version that would attract a lot of customers. This is just what he needed to win the market with ease.
He decided to continue with his musings, further allowing himself to think of the magnitude of what he was trying to create. Besides the advanced AI he would be employing, he knew he would need an assistant to do odd chores most likely to arise. Knowing this assistant wouldn't have to come daily, Henry took comfort knowing he would find it very helpful to have someone trustworthy whom he could call for assistance anytime it became necessary, more so to procure the necessary equipment or iron out any probable technical problems coming up in the course of things.
Although Henry had a pretty good personal computer, he fully realized it wasn't powerful enough to meet the demanding specifications of what he had in mind for his ambitious project. He had been reading up on research about Local Large Language Models-innovative systems designed to operate the capabilities of artificial intelligence independently, without relying on external servers for their processing needs. In other words, the problem was that Artificial Intelligence working on the extensive scale Henry had in mind simply could not run efficiently on a standard personal computer.
He would need much better resources for handling the great volume and, at the same time, the complexity of such tasks. Large language models, as involved in various applications, are required beyond the capability of a normal personal computer and often rely on remote servers to efficiently handle massive volumes of data. Henry knew full well that models like EnL ChatGPT did not run on an average personal computer but on high-powered and dedicated servers designed for doing heavy computational work.
This ultimately led Henry to one final realization: that such an ambitious undertaking would most certainly require a strong, sturdy infrastructure, finely built and developed in order to suitably support it. While at present, Henry did not possess many of the specific resources required to construct such infrastructure in its entirety, he was very well aware of the fact that a beginning must be had at any rate. It is precisely this realization that explains why he chose to leave his apartment today. He was rather eager to learn about the various types of equipment that would be required for him to set up a high-powered server, one that would adequately support his ever-greater ambitions and aspirations.
Already, he had identified the kind of server he needed to suit his requirements. This should act as a powerhouse to show such complex AI workloads can be handled without any failure or drop in efficiency. However, with an overall idea of what he was looking for, Henry was in that kind of situation where he was not precisely ready to buy anything at that very moment. He knew very well that with the financial resources he had at the time, he could not get everything he wanted in one go, so he just initiated the preliminary steps in gathering information and prudent planning for the future.
When he arrived at Microcenter, he approached a few staff members and asked about the hardware he was considering. Most of the answers were things he already knew, but he continued the search, knowing there was still more to discover. After wandering the aisles, he eventually made his way to the server section. As he was scanning the shelves, he heard a voice call out to him.
A voice spoke up and said, "Are you buying a server?"
Henry turned his attention towards the source of the sound and noticed a young man who had striking black hair and was wearing round glasses that gave him an intellectual appearance. The young man appeared to be quite friendly, and his relaxed, casual demeanor seemed to indicate that he possessed a good deal of knowledge and experience in the world of technology. In response to the young man's presence, Henry thoughtfully replied, "I might. I'm just doing some research before making a decision."
He agreed with the man and showed quite an important interest in everything that was taking place. "Do you need it for personal use or business, and is it a large scale?
Henry was taken aback for a moment by the eagerness of this man; nonetheless, he replied quite honestly: "For personal use, but on a large scale."
The man's eyebrows shot up, and he smiled in such a manner that it wasn't as if he was intrigued by the situation; maybe he was impressed by it. "Oh, personal use, huh? That's quite interesting! You must do really well for yourself if you're dealing with such a large-scale thing.
Henry let out a light chuckle, showing that he wasn't bothered at all by the comment made. "I wouldn't exactly label myself as rich, but I'm certainly hoping to find a way to make it work in my favor."
The man seemed slightly discontented and gestured to mean he asked for something more beyond what was given. "Do you have staffing for it sorted?" he asked, getting everything just so.
Staffing? Henry seemed taken aback by that question. "Staffing?" he repeated in a very startled tone.
He nodded in agreement like to say that what this statement uttered was to him the most obvious anything one might utter. "Large servers usually require regular maintenance and enough personnel so that no performance level and security measures are compromised at all. You don't want to have to deal with issues like unexpected downtime or even worse security breaches, do you?"
Henry's eyes grew wider in surprise as the realization slowly began to settle in his mind. It struck him with a force he had not anticipated; he hadn't considered this possibility at all until this very moment. Had he not come to this understanding at this point, he might have confronted some significant difficulties or challenges further along in his journey. "I understand now. However, I'm not truly interested in bringing on additional staff members at this moment. Is there a feasible way for me to operate a large-scale server without the need for that?"
The man was silent for a while, snatching an instant, getting himself ready to answer the question put right in front of him. "You could use other cloud services like Google Cloud, which is very in demand. In this case, you would not have to take any hassles of taking care of all the physical hardware yourself; it's all cared for by your service provider. Henry almost slapped himself on the forehead at this point. Of course, it was that simple-what had he been thinking? The use of cloud services would save him from the headache of managing physical servers and the complexities of managing personnel. "Thanks a lot for taking the time to clear that up for me. I truly would have found myself in quite a bit of trouble without your assistance."
"Absolutely no problem," he replied. A great big grin came onto his face as he added, "I'm really glad that I was able to help you out." He stretched out his hand toward me, greeting me with a friendly smile that indicated his welcome. "Incidentally, please let me introduce myself; my name is Michael," he said happily. It's an absolute delight to finally meet you, Michael," Henry said, beaming with welcoming warmth into a smile as he reached out with a handshake.
"My name is Henry, nice to meet you. Exchanging pleasantries, Henry felt a little lighter, his mind abuzz with new ideas of what was to come and how to get there. He had learned something very valuable just now.