I feel like I was used to being surrounded by noise — not because I'm a normal girl in China from a middle-class family in business and finance, but more because the signal-to-noise ratio of Chinese itself feels low, and I was trained to comply too easily.
But I know I'm an English person — have been since primary school. The moment I scored 97/100 competing with classmates who later got into Ivy League undergrads, the moment I spent long hours reading English alone — I just knew. Maybe because in China, science and technology are treated as the only subjects that lead.
Meritocracy hung over me like a Sword of Damocles, strictly dictating what deserved more of my time and what deserved less. Also, I hate that my academic life was shaped by capitalism — so naturally, I thought there was nothing wrong with following the default path.
Something shifted fundamentally when I got to college. Meritocracy had always been mainstream in China's academic environment, but in college I finally had more time to do what I truly loved — making magazines, making films, reading English books, using English to learn science and technology. Those things shaped who I am, and made me realize English is the only medium that carries science and technology.
And that's also why I feel LLMs truly embody the essence of how language and intelligence emerge together — in such a well-rounded way.
Speaking of now — maybe the theme has drifted a lot, but I'm so glad I endured: the allure of my parents' money, the allure of Chinese convenience, all the noise telling me I wasn't capable of using SoTA models to step into the next era. It's like air to me now — I can't imagine what life would be without this magic intelligence. And I know it's always been my North Star, since I was very young. It enlightened me, and it's guiding me, finally, home — on a spiritual level.