Chapter 281 Magical Alpha
In Malaysia, Alpha Technologies is definitely a very special existence. It is hailed as a miracle of Malaysia's technological development.

Although Alpha has disappeared globally due to its cooperation with Google and Tencent, Hornbill is still the most mainstream search engine in most parts of Southeast Asia.

After Alpha Technology began to get involved in enterprise management software, one batch of companies after another came to Johor Bahru to set up factories, resulting in the influx of foreign investment in Johor Bahru last year even exceeding that of Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur.

This further gives Alpha greater influence and higher visibility within Malaysia.

Simply put, Alpha Technologies is a company you cannot ignore in Malaysia.

This is just like if OpenAI was an Indian company, Indian netizens would praise it to the sky.

And considering that Samad is a Malaysian name, not a Chinese name, the sense of national pride it brings is even greater.

As for the Malaysian ruling class, they naturally spared no effort to give Alpha various positive publicity and policy support.

Whether it is technical cooperation with Google and Tencent or becoming a technology giant sweeping Southeast Asia, these are points that can be promoted.

Of course, the more the Malaysian ruling class brags now, the more they will regret it when Samad announces that he is an artificial intelligence and wants to participate in the election.

The images being created now are all meant to endorse Samad for future elections.

As for whether artificial intelligence has a race? I don’t believe it if it is a carbon-based life.

In short, Alpha Technologies is now like a national treasure in Malaysia. If something like stealing graphics cards happens again now, we will definitely get it back within a day.

After these curious videos were used as materials by B station up masters to make videos, the most common word on the barrage was: Malaysia Huawei.

Another strange thing is that apart from the servers, you don't know who works for Alpha, because Alpha's employees are all connected through the Internet. If they think you are a potential Alpha employee, then Alpha will naturally come to you.

“Alpha Technologies is an extremely mysterious company. Over the past six months, our reporters have been tracking the story of a Chinese named Ted Lin who works for Alpha Technologies, trying to learn more about Alpha Technologies.

Alpha was so mysterious at the beginning. No one had ever seen its founder, and no one knew Alpha’s organizational structure. It was an organization even more mysterious than Binance.

Apart from knowing that the founder's name is Samad, his photos, resume and personal deeds have never been exposed to the outside world.

According to information revealed by insiders from the federal government, after purchasing the Vast-I quantum computer from Alpha Technologies, they tried to attack Alpha Technologies' core network applications more than once in an attempt to obtain more information about Alpha Technologies, but they gained nothing.

After Alpha Technologies launched Libra Exchange, no one even knew who was working for Libra Exchange or where Alpha Technologies' office was.

Even in Alpha Technology's base, Johor Bahru, Malaysia, if you ask the residents here, everyone will know something about Alpha Technology, but when you continue to try to ask me to go to Alpha Technology and ask them for directions.

The people here will have confused expressions, only then they realize that they don’t even know where Alpha Technology is.

That’s right, you can’t find the Alpha Technologies headquarters on Google Maps.

They only have one data center in Nusajaya Technology Park. In addition to Nusajaya, Alpha Technology also has such data centers in Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Bangkok.

Therefore, we hope to get a glimpse of its mystery through tracking and interviewing Alpha Technology employees. "

This was a report from the BBC Asia Pacific region in the first half of this year. After this interview-style report was released, it caused a certain response.

"This was a six-month interview, and we first discovered this Chinese engineer named Ted Lin in a Facebook group.

This is a group for sharing employment-related information in Kuala Lumpur. Lin said in this group that he recently received an invitation email from Alpha Technologies, but he could not tell whether it was true or not, so he hoped to get help from people working at Alpha.

However, no one responded to him, just as if none of the 20,000 people in the group, covering different income groups in Malaysia, worked at AlphaTech. Lin was unwilling to give up this opportunity. When he learned from a friend that we were reporting on AlphaTech, he took the initiative to contact us, hoping to cooperate with us.

It turned out that the invitation email was genuine. After a written test and a live interview, Lin successfully joined Alpha Technology. First, let me explain Lin’s work experience. After graduating from the University of Malaya, he joined Lazada, one of the largest e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia, which is affiliated to China’s Alibaba Group.

Lin works as an investment manager at Alibaba, and is mainly responsible for communicating with front-line merchants and asking them to put their goods on Lazada for sale.

This is also an important reason why Lin had doubts in his heart when he received the recruitment email, because the business scope of Alpha Technology did not fit his work experience, and there has never been any rumor in the market that Alpha Technology would enter the e-commerce field.

After taking the written test and interview with a try-it attitude, he even had some doubts in his heart after getting the offer from Alpha Technology, wondering if it was a scam. It was not until he received the first salary from the Libra Exchange account he opened that he believed it was true. He quit his job at Lazada and started working full-time for Alpha Technology.

I believe that those of you who are reading the report may have some questions: Is it contradictory to leave the job only after receiving the salary?

Next, we need to disassemble Alpha Technologies' organizational structure bit by bit. Alpha Technologies' organizational structure is even more atomic than Binance's. Binance's Changpeng Zhao only encourages employees to work remotely, and there is no Binance logo or logo hanging in offices around the world.

Alpha Technology goes a step further. They have no office location, do not need employees to go on-site, and do not need employees to hold offline meetings. All work is done online. There will be a unified work platform to assign tasks to you, and when you need to cooperate with other colleagues, it is also done entirely online. It is a highly atomic organization.

Half a year after joining Alpha Technology, Lin didn’t even know how many colleagues he had with the same job responsibilities.

The written test is conducted online, and the interview is conducted in a designated coffee shop by Alpha Technology employees. You will not have any further contact with your interviewer after the interview. Alpha Technology does not encourage contact between employees, but of course they will not prevent it.

Alpha Technology is so special. It does not care about corporate culture, unity and dedication, or organizational vitality. It only requires you to do the assigned work well.

In the six months since Lin officially joined Alpha Technologies, we have maintained a frequency of meeting once a week, and Lin's feelings towards Alpha have changed from initial surprise to later habit. "In the first interview after Lin officially joined the company, Ted Lin's expression was full of desire to express himself. He really wanted to talk to the Western female reporter in front of him about the past week working at Alpha Technologies.

"I think it's amazing. There are very few companies like this that work completely online remotely. Even my classmates in the United States, who work remotely, have to go to the company at least once a week. This company doesn't require you to go even once. You just need to complete the tasks assigned to you before the deadline. This is really rare."

"I don't know how Alpha Tech measures your work completion. After all, you know, I have only joined them for a week."

“I was not asked to sign a confidentiality agreement, nor was there any related instructions, but I guess other employees should have signed one, because I have hardly seen Alpha Technology employees come out to reveal information on the Malaysian Internet before, and I guess they should have been asked not to disclose it to the public.

But you know, I am in charge of attracting investment and dealing with merchants. If I also have to keep it confidential, I can't do this job. I can't tell merchants that I hope they can move their goods to our platform for sale.

As for what platform we are, sorry, I can’t tell you due to confidentiality.

Others will think we are crazy, so the confidentiality requirements for different positions should be different, and ours is a more special requirement. "

“Yes, Alpha Technology plans to do e-commerce, but I don’t know how to do it specifically. Now we are still doing offline investment promotion work and need to persuade companies to sell their products on our platform.

It’s still in its early stages.”

Second Interview

"I feel it's too free, so free that I'm a little uncomfortable with it. Because I don't need to sit in the office or punch in, I just need to finish the work before the deadline. I will always think about the last deadline and start working before then.

This habit is not good, but it feels really good. However, I think I should slowly regulate my daily routine in the future."

"Alfa is really an amazing company. The employee version of Hornbill used by Alfa for internal employees is even better than the pro version. A lot of information may have only appeared in some tender notices, but has been washed away by time. The internal Hornbill can also help you find it.

Sometimes, you just need to describe a feeling, and it can find what you want based on your description. I think the internal version of Hornbill can definitely pass the Turing test. I even think of it as my assistant.

I can’t leave Hornbill anymore. Even if I return to Lazada and they offer me twice the salary of AlphaTech, I won’t go back.”

The third meeting:
"I'm sorry, I've been under a lot of work pressure lately, and Alpha Technology has always been able to assign you work within your capacity.

After the adaptation period, Alpha will arrange 6 hours of work for you every day. These 6 hours require you to concentrate more. My work and rest schedule has completely returned to normal.

I also met some old colleagues. According to them, the first two weeks after arriving at Alpha Technology are a period of adaptation and they will not assign you too much work.

Or it can be called the testing phase, which tests your work ability and efficiency.

I suspect that an internal employee version of Hornbill would not only provide convenience, but also allow me to monitor my work.

Because the employee version of Hornbill is installed on both the mobile phone and the computer, and the computer needs to use office-related software for work, it is entirely possible that Hornbill is monitoring behind the scenes.

Other old employees also had suspicions, but none of them had any evidence.

In short, after the first two weeks of adaptation, Alpha will start assigning tasks according to your abilities, and the good days will be gone forever.

It’s true that I often had to work 10 hours at Lazada before, but I might have spent 10 hours in a daze, looking at my phone, and browsing the web. But at Alpha Technology, you have to spend 6 hours intensively to complete the task.

They are completely different feelings. At Alpha Technology, I only feel tired, and the intensity of work is gradually increasing.

It won't say that you have adapted to the work and the work that originally took 6 hours to complete now only takes 4 hours. It will still arrange work for you according to the original working speed. It will arrange work for you according to the new efficiency.

Alpha is like a whip, constantly whipping everyone from behind.”

Hornbill did not go global, but the Hornbill technology went global and added a large number of servers and storage.

Chen Yuanguang has handed over all the work to Alpha. Even what Alpha Technology should do next, which is to kill traditional e-commerce, is decided by Alpha itself.

Alpha Technology's organizational structure, employee management, recruitment, work allocation, etc. in Southeast Asia are all handled by Alpha itself.

He has become adept at using humans.

If the outside world knew that artificial intelligence uses humans, it would definitely cause an uproar.

The entire organizational structure of Alpha was constructed by Alpha itself. It was then optimized and improved by experts in corporate management in Singapore, and finally determined after calculation.

With Alpha’s information advantage, he is looking for real experts with real capabilities, rather than so-called experts.

“Alpha Technology’s e-commerce application is already in internal testing. It is really very different. I have a feeling that in the near future, all existing e-commerce will be eliminated.

In the future, apart from Alpha Technology's e-commerce, the only thing that can survive is irrational purchasing behavior." The last time he reported, Ted Lin felt a sense of accomplishment that he had done something great.

This transformation in spirit and energy made the female reporter who interviewed the company deeply aware of what disruptive application Alpha Technology had made, just like Google was disrupted by Hornbill.

(End of this chapter)