很久没有写点什么了，但又一直以来想写些什么。感觉可能是有的时候会不自觉地给自己一些压力，比如写出来的东西完全没眼看怎么办什么的。但又仔细想想，本来写点什么这件事情对于我来说，主要目的是抒发自己的一些情绪和思想，做一些记录，按理来说是完完全全写给自己的。但可能人就是这样，很多事情本该是为自己而做，却永远逃不开别人的目光，甚至来自自己未来的目光也像别人的目光一样审视着现在的文字，所以说还是会有些压力；但总不能不写，因为我享受写点什么的过程，即使可能未来的自己看到这些会说："怎么我还能这么矫情"，但对于当下的我来讲，能够随心所欲地写些东西还是一件蛮享受的事情；因此这份随笔便是我在飞机上随心所欲而写下的。
算了算自己已经有大概四年半没有回国了，感觉是个很长的时间，但一想到这四年半自己做了那么多事情，就又会觉着："才四年半啊"，这种感觉。因此也非常感谢自己这些年的努力吧。说回最近，25年是我工作的第一年，本来想着是要去读博的，可没想到自己这么幸运的得到了一个对我来说非常契合的offer，那肯定就毅然决然选择来湾区了。而感觉工作以后最大的变化就是，终于有了些源自自己"内心"的力量；不仅仅是说我终于可以经济独立了（当然这毫无疑问也是很重要的），更多是说有了一种自洽的感觉。对自己的了解清晰了一些，对我在这个世界的位置，和我能提供的价值，也有了更多的认知。说白了："我没有自己想象的那么菜，也没有自己想象的那么强"，那我到底大概是什么样的，我大概有了更多的了解；我认为逐步了解自己就是人逐渐自洽的过程，而逐渐自洽的过程便是成长的过程。所以看起来我成长了一些，因此还是很满意的。但也在时刻警醒自己，不要对自己太自信：具体是指，不要以为自己真的很了解自己了，了解自己本身就是一生的课题。
在这里还是想分享点有趣而实际的一些东西来佐证一些我对自己的认知。蔡哥成立我司的时候说要找到那1%的天才来跟他一起做公司，于是我拿到我们公司offer的时候扪心自问了一下，我是1%的天才吗？ 那很明显不是的 ，我觉得自己不差，但离天才差距甚远，毕竟我可是从小在海淀卷，但怎么也没办法把自己卷进市重点的人。这个门槛不高，所以足以证明我跟天才这二字相差甚远。但我可能成为1%的天才吗，我觉着说不定有可能。之所以这样讲是因为对于"1%的天才"这个群体的定义可能是不一样的，如果纯粹按天生智商来排队，那可能不必多说；但我觉着蔡哥说的可能不是这样定义，或者说我觉得能够跟他一起把事情做出来的人不仅仅是那些拥有超凡智商的人。而我觉着我具备着一个可以潜在成为1%天才的重要要素"热爱"；这个热爱并不是说热爱现在手头上干的活，而是一种热爱的能力，是一种不断能够给自己设立目标，付出努力的动力；热爱的目标可以随着时间的积累不断调整，但能够有能力去"热爱"本身，是我一直认为自己的最大优势。
在这里可以举一个不恰当的例子，如果人脑是个语言模型，基因带来了pretrain的知识，教育带来了SFT的知识，那学会热爱就是学会给自己做RL。你需要让自己往某些范式上做优化，你需要有方向和动力。这么多年我觉得我最大的优势就是于此；我在每个阶段都知道自己大概想要什么，大概知道自己喜欢什么，做什么会让自己兴奋。也可以说我兴奋的阈值很低，其实有很多很多事情是我觉得做起来非常exciting的，因此这么多年我经常挖了很多很多坑，苦于的其实是自己没有精力或者没有能力把很多令我兴奋的项目填上。我感觉这就是我的天赋，因为我从小如此，甚至能追溯到我小学一二年级的时光（再往前记忆可能就太不清晰了）。但即使如此，我在逐步自洽的过程中也经历了非常多的磨难，有个很大的课题一直困扰着高中和大学时期的我："我热爱的这些东西，真的有用吗？我是不是在自我欺骗？它们是否真的有价值呢？"其实有这样的质疑非常合理，原因也异常简单，这些事跟学生时期的普世价值并不相关。我做这些事情，不会让自己考试分数变好（甚至可能变差），不会获得什么竞赛奖励，更不会帮助我的升学（这里我之前以为是有帮助的，因此才决定的出国留学，但后来发现帮助还是微乎其微），到了大学也不会变成更好的GPA，甚至不如一些普通的兴趣爱好做得好还能获得身边同学的认可。所以之前的那么多年我非常痛苦，一方面我坚持着自己觉着对的事情"保持热爱"，另一方面其实只有我自己一个人在认可着这件事，而这份认可也是非常弱小的，随便一些挫折便会让我不断加强自己的怀疑。
幸运的是我坚持下来了，而我也证明了我自己的坚持是对的。从初中，到高中，到大学，到现在开始工作，我发现我的热爱和普世的价值，在慢慢converge，而最终，在2025年工作这年，两个方向合二为一，形成了我的自洽。这件事情感觉非常神奇，但又顺理成章，因为我的热爱的力量，让我有意无意的将这两条看似平行的线路开始了合并。就比如举个非常小的例子（这样的事情这么多年发生了很多）：因为我要做字幕组，所以我开始做AI翻译，所以我接触了语音，进入了Shinji的lab。这些看似都是偶然，但又完完全全是必然。
那说回1%的天才，我明显没有这么高的智商天赋，但老天好像给了我另一本秘籍，是一种完全不同的修炼功法，让我说不定有一天，也会成为那个1%。这件事不一定，但有这份可能性便足矣了。
感谢这一切
我何其幸运
— 2025.11.1 于横跨太平洋飞往北京的波音777上
It has been a long time since I wrote anything, though I have wanted to the whole while. I think I unconsciously put pressure on myself sometimes — what if what I write turns out to be unreadable? But thinking it through properly: the main purpose of writing, for me, is to let out some feelings and thoughts, to keep a record. By rights it is written entirely for myself. Maybe people are just like this, though — so many things that ought to be done for oneself can never quite escape other people's eyes. Even one's own future gaze scrutinises the present text the way a stranger's would, so some pressure remains. But not writing isn't an option, because I enjoy the process of it. Even if my future self reads this and says "how could I have been so precious about everything", for me right now, writing whatever I please is quite an enjoyable thing. So these notes are what I wrote, freely, on a plane.
I worked out that I haven't been back to China for about four and a half years. It feels like a long time — but then I think about how much I did in those four and a half years, and it flips into: "only four and a half years?" So I am grateful to myself for the effort of these years. As for recently: 2025 is my first year working. I had originally intended to do a PhD, but I was lucky enough to receive an offer that fit me remarkably well, and so of course I chose the Bay Area without hesitation. The biggest change since starting work is that I finally have some strength that comes from inside me. Not only that I can finally be financially independent — which matters, without question — but more that there is a sense of being at peace with myself. My understanding of myself has sharpened a little, and so has my sense of my place in this world and of the value I can provide. Put plainly: "I'm not as bad as I imagined, and not as good as I imagined either." What am I roughly, then? I have a better idea now. I think gradually coming to know yourself is the process of gradually becoming self-consistent, and that process is what growth is. So it seems I have grown a little, and I am satisfied with that. But I keep reminding myself not to be too confident — specifically, not to assume I really know myself yet. Knowing yourself is a lifelong subject.
I'd like to share something concrete, and a little amusing, to support my read on myself. When Cai-ge founded my company, he said he wanted to find the 1% — the geniuses — to build it with him. So when I got our offer, I asked myself honestly: am I one of the 1%? Obviously not. I don't think I'm bad, but I am a long way from genius. After all, I ground away in Haidian from childhood and still couldn't grind my way into a municipal key school. That bar isn't especially high, which is proof enough of the distance between me and the word "genius". But could I become one of the 1%? I think it isn't impossible. I say that because the definition of "the 1% of geniuses" can differ. If you queue people up purely by innate IQ, there is nothing more to say. But I don't think that is how Cai-ge meant it — or rather, I don't think the people who can actually build something with him are only those with extraordinary IQ. And I think I have one important ingredient for potentially becoming one of that 1%: love. Not love for whatever work happens to be in front of me, but the capacity to love — a drive that can keep setting goals for itself and keep putting in the effort. The object of that love can be adjusted as time accumulates, but the ability to love itself is what I have always considered my greatest advantage.
Here is an imperfect analogy. If the human brain is a language model, then genes supply the pretraining knowledge and education supplies the SFT — and learning to love is learning to run RL on yourself. You have to optimise yourself toward certain patterns; you need a direction and a drive. Over the years I think this has been my single greatest advantage. At every stage I have roughly known what I wanted, roughly known what I liked, known what would excite me. You could also say my threshold for excitement is very low: there are a great many things I find genuinely exciting to do, and so over the years I have dug a great many holes — my problem being that I lack the energy, or the ability, to fill in all the projects that excite me. I feel this is my talent, because it has been this way since I was small, traceable back to the first or second grade (any earlier and the memory gets too faint). Even so, becoming gradually self-consistent involved a great deal of suffering. One large question troubled me all through high school and university: "These things I love — are they actually useful? Am I deceiving myself? Do they really have value?" That doubt was entirely reasonable, for a very simple reason: none of it connected to the universal values of student life. Doing these things wouldn't improve my exam scores — it might well worsen them — wouldn't win me competition prizes, and certainly wouldn't help my applications (I used to think it would, which is why I decided to study abroad, but later found the help was negligible). At university it wouldn't turn into a better GPA. It wasn't even as good as an ordinary hobby done well, which at least earns the recognition of the classmates around you. So for many years I was in real pain: on one side I held on to what I believed was right — "keep loving" — and on the other, I was the only person affirming it, and that affirmation was very weak. The slightest setback would sharpen the doubt again.
Fortunately I held on, and I proved my own persistence right. From middle school, to high school, to university, to starting work now, I have found that what I love and what the world values have been slowly converging — and finally, in 2025, the year I started working, the two directions merged into one and formed my self-consistency. It feels miraculous and yet entirely logical, because the force of that love led me, wittingly or not, to begin merging two seemingly parallel tracks. A very small example, and there have been many such over the years: because I wanted to run a subtitling group, I started working on AI translation; through that I came into contact with speech, and entered Shinji's lab. These all look like accidents, and they are also completely inevitable.
So, back to the 1%. I clearly don't have that height of raw intellectual gift, but heaven seems to have handed me a different manual — a completely different method of cultivation — which means that one day I might, after all, become one of that 1%. It isn't certain. But the possibility is enough.
Grateful for all of it.
How fortunate I have been.
— 1 Nov 2025, on a Boeing 777 across the Pacific, bound for Beijing