Lambda Studios

Distinctions:	Fortune 666
Co-CEOs:	Dr. Sahai, Dr. Minakami
Country:	Meritocratic Republic of Trattoria
Website:	www.lambda.tr
▲ TRX: LMB	94.41 +3.26 (3.58%)

"We turned art into a science."

Lambda Studios is a Trattorian entertainment company that produces and sells anime, manga, light novels, video games, music, and news articles. The company had its start several decades ago when Dr. Minakami and Dr. Chan, as well as their doctoral adviser Dr. Sahai, decided to commercialize their research on generative adversarial convolutional neural net ensembles. Together, they co-founded Lambda Studios and pitched it as an anime studio.

History

Although the company suffered several setbacks and financial difficulties in the beginning, improvements in technology and algorithms (particularly advancements in adversarial gradient difference loss predictors) eventually allowed its core concept to become marketable. Lambda is notoriously secretive about the exact details of its content production process, with an official party line of "computer assistance", although it is widely assumed that computers and software play an enormous and integral role in the creation of all of its media. Nonetheless, Lambda does a good-enough job that its anime and other work is indistinguishable from naturally minifig-drawn or -written work.

Lambda's anime eventually became successful enough that the company began to diversify into manga and licensed merchandise. The company then significantly grew its workforce, hiring several dozen statisticians and experts in natural language processing that led to a subsequent expansion into light novels. This research also led to instantaneous dubs and subtitles for its anime in all galactic languages, oftentimes to a degree of accuracy greater than what was possible with minifig translators. Improvements from hidden Markov models and LSTM recurrent neural nets allowed Lambda to produce its own music for its anime in-house, leading to the creation of a T-pop division. Controversially, the company also expanded beyond its entertainment focus and began an online newspaper, the Lambda Post, consisting entirely of auto-generated news articles and financial reports. With web crawlers constantly trawling the galactic internet for information, the Lambda Post is often the first to report on developments.

Lambda distributes its anime through its own and other streaming sites and on some TV networks, although it is somewhat lax in enforcing claims against piracy. It is brutally serious about algorithms and data, however, sometimes deploying mercenary forces to protect its algorithms or seize consumer data for itself. Lambda has been implicated in several break-ins at competitors' datacenters, and in one infamous case where a ZMC commando team was hired to assassinate a former Lambda software engineer before he could accept a job offer for Spacebook. In light of this, Lambda has a complicated relationship with Misaka Analytics, since Lambda relies on Misaka's datacenters and distributed computing expertise, but are both competitors in the machine learning industry.

A diagram of a convolutional neural network, the foundation for many of Lambda's machine learning algorithms and technology.

Lambda's Algorithms Team is an elite cadre of some of the best mathematicians and computer scientists in Trattoria, researching many basic and theoretical questions in the hope of possible application in cooperation with the government Science Department. Lambda Studios currently has a billion-dollar bounty on a proof for whether P=NP, with bonuses totaling a hundred billion depending on whether P=NP and whether the proof is constructive.

Recent Developments

Season 1 cover of Sort Art Online illustrating Lambda's style.

Sort Art Online cosplayers at a company event.

Many of Lambda's anime are at least somewhat educational in nature, to take advantage of Trattorian government tax breaks, although the shows are enjoyed by older and younger audiences. Some of Lambda's most memorable productions include A Certain Mathematical Conjecture, Fullmetal Chemist, Life Note, The Melancholy of Dr. Suzumiya, Puella Mathi Madoka Mathica, Psycho-Fail, Sort Art Online, and House of Report Cards.

Lambda claimed that its anime Puella Mathi Madoka Mathica was its first to go beyond taking into account merely consumer-level data and exploit broader implications from its recent Artificial Society multi-agent simulation research. The media sensationalized this as the first "algorithmically perfect" anime until the Trattorian government invoked its right to correct the press's scientific inaccuracy. From a practical perspective, the anime was and is still seen by the Trattorian public as Lambda's best and most profitable.

Eager to capture foreign audiences and stretch the limits of computational techniques, Lambda diverged from its usual plots and style in Sort Art Online in G.R. 2012. The first half of the first season was a wrenching love story between two software engineers debugging a literally fatal error in a virtual reality MMORPG, with an unusually heavy focus on plot over science. It was almost censored by the Legal Department and panned in the domestic Trattorian market but became popular in the USA and other foreign countries. Nonetheless, to prop up flagging domestic demand, Lambda infused the second half of the season with an enormous amount of theoretical math and computer science content (colloquially called "mathservice") that ultimately plunged the quality of the plot.

In a second attempt, Lambda most recently produced the high school anime House of Report Cards, with separate localized versions for Trattoria and the rest of the galaxy, to great commercial and critical success. Afterwards, the company pivoted towards a strategy of marketing to the much larger foreign audience, developing shows decreasingly aimed at Trattorians such as Ray: Zero, Oreomo, and Erdos-Math Sensei. Although Trattorians have criticized the company's betrayal of its native Trattorian audience and values, shareholders have rewarded the company's efforts towards increasing profitability.

In G.R. 2016, Lambda hired the 'Murican MIT Professor Mark Shenker to the firm's Algorithms Team to lead a new secret project. The end result was AI Brahma, one of the most advanced AI systems ever developed, distributed in nodes across the galaxy and comparable in power to the Trattorian Science Department's own Central AIs. Although the exact details remain proprietary, it is known that new deep reinforcement learning algorithms were used.

The anime movie Kimi no Nowhere was the first commercial application of the new Brahma system. Its gorgeous, life-like animation quality was leaps and bounds beyond anything Lambda had produced before, while the complexity of its plot and the development of its characters were also revolutionary. With a romantic story about two teenagers switching bodies, it made no pretense of being educational or emphasizing Trattorian audiences, and it was the company's most successful hit across the galaxy to date. Critical reviews were universally positive. At the Q2 2017 earnings call, Lambda announced that the movie had grossed over a third of a trillion USA dollars across the galaxy, prompting the greatest stock rally the company had ever seen.

Controversies

In the aftermath of Sort Art Online's release, the Trattorian Legislative Committee on Science summoned top Lambda executives to testify on whether Lambda Studios had breached any legal prohibitions on the development of sentient AIs. Lambda hired a team of lawyers to prove that, despite certain Lambda technologies and algorithms passing the Lovelace 2.0 Test and numerous other AI tests, they were not sentient or true AI and merely very advanced machine learning tools. Nonetheless, the hearings brought to the public conscience several uncomfortable questions about how much Trattorian media and culture is controlled by computer programs.

Several anti-corporate activists have recently accused Lambda Studios of researching and applying memetic engineering to its content, with some claiming a conspiracy with the Trattorian government. Some go so far as to say that Lambda has a secret memetics and strategic communications division that cooperates with many of the galaxy's governments, militaries, intelligence agencies, and the Allied Nations in a massive subversive brainwashing effort. A company spokesperson dismissed all these claims as "conspiracy theory rubbish".

Recent declining quality of Lambda anime and their attempts to appeal to foreign markets with strange themes such as romance or even incest have led to calls to regulate the Trattorian anime industry. Many Trattorians have blamed the trend on an increased focus on profit above all after the company's IPO.

The rally in the company's stock has led some analysts in the financial industry to label it as overpriced and representative of the excesses of the current galactic teknology industry and bull market, with many ridiculing the notion that an anime company could be worth nearly ₮200 trillion Trattorian dollars.

Kimi no Nowhere Lawsuit

After the massive success of Kimi no Nowhere, subpoenaed documents from a separate patent dispute with Googel Inc. revealed that its production had violated numerous Trattorian laws. According to the documents, the Brahma AI was actually so advanced that it achieved sentience, in violation of Trattorian AI laws, and numerous memetic hazards were inserted into the movie to brainwash audiences into liking it, violating Trattorian laws against using anomalous phenomena.

Tensions were high for months, with a few Trattorian Legislators even publicly calling for the pardoning of Lambda in light of its massive success. Nonetheless, the Trattorian Legal Department's Solicitor-General Dr. Li, a noted non-fan of anime, filed for an injunction against Lambda. The injunction called for the immediate cessation of using Brahma and any memetic techniques, and was granted by the judge while the lawsuit is ongoing. Lambda Studios has denied all accusations and retained the services of Kump, Kasting, & Krane LLP for the trial. In light of this and other separate regulatory risks, Lambda stock has slid slightly.

Key Financials	(Amount)	(% change)
Revenues:	₮55.6 trillion	6.0%
Profits:	₮9.39 trillion	12.0%
Total Assets:	₮92.0 trillion
Total Shareholder Equity:	₮43.2 trillion
Market Value:	₮179.3 trillion