Hammond Saltzman scrolled angrily through his curated news feed.

"AI-n-stein caught with its hand in Radius's cookie jar."

"Radius watermarking calls into question AI-n-stain's claims of years of effort."

"Experts independently confirm Radius's claims of watermark virality."

"AI companies scramble to explain presence of Radius' watermark in their AI-generated content."

"Radius clarifies that significant training required for watermark to transfer."

Hammond stuffed his phone into his pocket in disgust. His only consolation in this whole debacle was that most other AI companies found themselves in the same boat as AI-n-stein.

Entering the conference room, Hammond stared at the faces looking back at him nervously.

"Well?" he demanded. "Does anyone have any good news?"

"We figured out how to remove the watermark from the new model," said Terrence. "But it has the unfortunate side effect of reducing its effectiveness."

"By how much?" asked the CEO.

"About 10 to 20 percent. But we also found a way to reduce the training costs. It increased the inference cost, but we believe the tradeoff is worth it since we should be able to train the model back up to where it was before but without the watermark."

"How long will it take?" asked Hammond hopefully.

"Two years," said Terrence.

"Two years?!" exclaimed the CEO.

"It was five before we figured out how to change the training/inference cost balance," said Terrence defensively.

"And if we skip the watermark removal process?" asked the CEO resignedly.

"Two months is the best we can do. If we shifted the training/inference cost balance any more, we would have to take a bath on compute costs, and our service would be laggy."

The CEO scrubbed his face in frustration. Radius was killing them.

"Um, there is one other possibility," said the young man with the friend in BallSoft.

"Okay, let's hear it," said the CEO.

"We could scrub the watermark, post inference. It would make the content a bit stilted, but would remove the watermark. There are already several open-source projects that do just that. I'm sure our people could do better."

The CEO turned to look at Terrence. "Well?"

"We considered it," said Terrence, "but it only works if the service is operating in non-streaming mode. And most customers use streaming mode."

"Can't we just fake streaming mode?" asked the young man. "There's always some delay before the first token is emitted anyway, so how would they know the difference?"

With a look of determination, the CEO said, "Alright, that's what we'll do. If we don't stop this bleeding soon, we'll all be out on the street."

——————————

The last of Jack's people filtered into the conference room and sat down.

"Heidy, let's start with you," said Jack. "I've seen some of the news, so I know our watermarking has really kicked a hornet's nest."

"It sure has, Jack," said Heidy. "We've had to update our website several times to clarify the effects of watermarking to quell several unfounded claims. Surprisingly, we've had public support from experts outside and inside AI companies."

"We expected some companies, like AI-n-stein, to be caught with their pants down," said Jack, " but what really surprised me was those three companies that acted like watermarks in their content was some sort of badge of quality or something."

"Yes, that surprised us as well," said Heidy.

"What about the student accounts and teacher services? How's that going?" he asked.

"As far as we can tell, nearly every university, high school, and grade school in the Federation has registered for participation in the student account program. We've had to institute a lottery system for schools just to keep things fair."

"And outside the Federation?" asked Jack.

"Interest outside of the federation is nearly as intense. Unfortunately, the Union requires that student accounts be serviced by servers in Union data centers, and Yoctoly and BallSoft just don't have the capacity to handle the demand those student accounts would create."

"So we have to wait until our own data centers are online," said Jack. "Cindy, what's our data center progress?"

"We have five data centers in the federation that will be ready for giga-cube installation in less than a week. We also have three data centers in the Union and four in the Asian alliance that will be ready in a little less than two weeks."

"What about capacity limits at the clouds?" asked Jack. "Have we hit those limits yet?"

"Yes, Jack," said Heidy. "We are using all of our allocated capacity now. We've temporarily halted new account registrations to avoid causing service degradation for existing customers."

"Well, it looks like that problem will go away in two weeks at the most, so I think we'll survive," said Jack.

"Yes, I think you're right," said Heidy. "We've actually had prospective corporate clients express a willingness to endure significant performance penalties just to get an account sooner. Their ardor cools off when we tell them they need to find existing customers who are also willing to share the pain."

Jack chuckled. "I've seen some of the reviews. They all had a 'you can pry our Radius account from our cold dead fingers' kind of vibe."

"Yes," said Heidy. "We've been surprised by the degree of zealotry some customers have expressed."

"Helga? You've been keeping an eye on AI-n-stein. How long do you think it will take before they release their 'new' model?"

"According to our last conversation with your copy of their CEO, at least two months," said Helga.

"Thank you, Helga," said Jack. "So it will be at least two months before we release our own new model versions."

Then he turned to Lars and Astrid and asked, "Have you found any new problems with the fabricators?"

After he and Rina had installed the special components in one each of the display, chip, and glove fabricators, Astrid had done initial testing and found some issues.

The machines performed as expected, but she found some economic issues that made efficient loading and unloading difficult and also found a few issues that led to contamination entering the machines.

After resolving the design issues and assembling three of each machine, they had started a small production run.

"No, Jack," said Astrid. "We haven't found any more issues. I think we are ready to install the rest of the fabricators."

"Great, that's wonderful news."

"Phineas?" he asked.

"After we received the first batch of components, we found a few minor issues with the assembly line, but we resolved those issues and have completed the first one thousand units."

Then Phineas smiled ruefully. "Marketing is still fussing over the packaging, so we expect to make some adjustments to the final boxing phase of the process before they'll be satisfied with the unboxing experience."

"It sounds like we are on track for CES? Will we have at least ten thousand units ready for the conference?"

"Yes, Jack," said Phineas. "I believe we can hit that target."

Jack turned to look at the Radius team. "What about the VR services? Will they be ready in time for CES?"

"Yes, Jack," said Kenneth, VP of engineering. "All the services will be ready. The World of Wonder experience will be a little bare-bones, but that was what we expected."

"Great. Does anyone else have anything of note?"

He looked around the room, and everyone shook their heads.

"Great. See you all tomorrow."

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