AI (2)
A peculiar undercurrent seemed to run through the Phoenix team members.
I was the newly appointed CEO who had just acquired the company, so they were probably tense, eager to put my abilities to the test once and for all.
The team members’ gazes gradually drifted toward one person.
Team Leader Gong Minjae. You’re the one who has to do it, right?
That was the look in their eyes.
Receiving those looks, Team Leader Gong answered.
“Very well.”
From the looks of it, Team Leader Gong was the ace of the Phoenix team.
“But, CEO. It might… take a little time.”
“That’s fine.”
Team Leader Gong sat down at the dedicated computer linked to the data center.
Tap.
His fingers flew across the keys, entering commands.
“I’ll start by accessing the existing company server.”
Clack-clack-clack.
ssh phoenix_core192.165.00.00
password: qkdrntjr
[Connected to Phoenix Core Server]
“Connection complete. Now I’ll connect to the data center.”
Clack-clack-clack.
datacenter_key.admin203.252.0.0
Welcome to JH Data Center
Click. Click.
“Both servers are linked. I’ll transfer the existing Phoenix company materials to the data center.”
Team Leader Gong uploaded the files.
Clack-clack-clack.
scp ―r.training/
The monitor rapidly spat out logs.
[INFO] Model loading… done.
[INFO] Recognition initiated.
A progress bar climbed.
3%, 12%, 47%……
“This is data for simultaneously judging two questions: whether a person is present or not, and whether something is a person or not.”
“Transfer complete. From here on, it’s the data center and AI’s domain.”
Team Leader Gong looked at me with an expression that said he had finished his part.
“Now we’ll just have to wait a moment… huh?”
Team Leader Gong’s pupils wavered.
Then he rubbed his eyes with his hands.
“What?!”
His face was pure incomprehension.
At that reaction, the other employees asked,
“What is it?”
Team Leader Gong’s mouth fell open.
“Holy… the results are already out.”
The AI team employees stirred.
Team Leader Gong himself spoke in excitement.
“Wow, something that used to take twenty hours done in just a few seconds. Incredible.”
Beside him, another employee asked,
“What percent?”
Beep.
“It’s 43%… no, wait…”
“46%, 49%… 58%… no, every time I try to answer, it keeps climbing in real time!”
The Phoenix team members were stunned as well.
“What?!”
“The numbers keep rising?”
“Yes. The AI is learning in real time, and the accuracy figures keep going up.”
“No matter how recognition-focused it is, is it even possible for accuracy to rise like this in real time?”
Beep-beep-beep.
Numbers appeared on the monitor in front of Team Leader Gong.
“It’s 99.9999%. Wow, that means mastery. Our module’s AI has mastered both questions.”
Team Leader Gong and the rest of the Phoenix team members’ eyes sparkled.
“No way—the work we spent two years on… takes ten seconds here?”
“Wow, so this is what a big corporation can do.”
“No. Other big corporations can’t do this. It’s because it’s here.”
“CEO. This data center… that LPU, is it? What even is this? What exactly am I connected to right now? This is…”
Team Leader Gong’s confusion flipped straight into excitement.
“CEO. Our data center seems like a genius.”
He was already calling the data center “our” data center.
“A genius?”
“Of course. Teach it something and it absorbs it in an instant. I finally understand what people mean when they say it learns like a sponge.”
The employees beside him grew excited too and began throwing out ideas.
“We spent two years trying to teach it this, and it already learned everything? Then we should try teaching it something else, right?”
“Should we try open-source?”
“You want to use unverified stuff?”
“Tons of people already use it, though. Just getting something up to open-source level takes forever.”
“No. Let’s start it with baby steps. Stably. Run it through internal programs.”
“Won’t that be slow?”
“This one’s different. Have you seen our data center’s response speed? Our data center! Our kid is a super ultra genius!”
“Ooooh! Our kid is a genius!”
Today’s gathering had been the first meeting for them to meet me as the new CEO.
The awkwardness, the stiff formality, the constant reading of the room—none of that remained among the Phoenix employees.
“Oh! Pulling an all-nighter tonight?”
“Order some jokbal! Let’s experience the joy of teaching a genius.”
“Oho. So I get to teach a genius myself.”
Team Leader Gong Minjae looked at me and said,
“CEO. We’ll raise a conversational AI. We’ll teach it step by step from the basics. It probably won’t take long.”
Looking around, the other Phoenix team members seemed to agree.
I wasn’t an AI specialist, but I understood one thing clearly.
When employees’ eyes were sparkling with this kind of excitement, the best thing to do was leave them alone.
“Everyone?”
“Yes!”
“The data center is the body. Please raise this child’s mind well.”
“Yes! Leave it to us!”
One week later.
Knock-knock.
“Yes. Come in.”
It was Team Leader Gong Minjae.
“Has the AI’s level risen a bit?”
“Yes. The speed is astonishing. It’s at the 80% recognition stage.”
“How far is that, specifically?”
“Using photos of strawberries and apples, its accuracy at telling whether something is a strawberry or an apple is 80%. We’re providing a wide variety of pictures. The recognition rate is shooting up vigorously.”
“I see. How long do you think it’ll take to finish the recognition stage?”
“A few months should do it.”
“Really?”
To my sense of things, that still sounded a little long.
But Team Leader Gong’s view seemed different.
“This is a truly absurd speed. Other AIs take five years at the absolute fastest just to clear the recognition stage. And even then, it’s not to a 100% standard. Our AI feels like it’s growing by leaps and bounds every time you look away.”
If the AI team said so, then that was how it was.
“I see. Is there anything else you need?”
“No. We’re raising it very well.”
“Still. If I couldn’t offer support, that would be one thing, but we have some room, so I was wondering if there’s anything I could help with.”
“Hmm…”
Team Leader Gong thought for a moment, then said,
“There are still a few things the AI gets confused about.”
“What are they?”
“I’d need to show you the photos. When the pictures are ambiguously similar, it still gets mixed up.”
“Photos? Then try connecting through this computer.”
The computer on my desk could also link to the data center.
The data center was accessible from the floor where the AI team worked and from my seat in the CEO’s office.
“Ah, this connects to the data center too?”
“Yes. Direct access.”
I entered the authentication key into the login window.
A moment later, the screen switched, and Team Leader Gong stepped beside me and moved the mouse.
“This one.”
The first photo appeared.
“That’s a puppy… no, it isn’t.”
I had thought it was a puppy, but looking closer, the texture was off.
It was a golden-brown baked muffin.
A few chocolate chips sat on top of the muffin like a dog’s ears and nostrils.
Meaning the AI had classified this as a dog.
“…Yeah, that would be confusing.”
Not just the AI—even a person would be thrown off.
“Right? It actually classified it as ‘dog’ with a probability of 0.83. Look at another photo.”
Team Leader Gong opened another image.
This time, a yellow curve.
The moment I thought “banana,” the tip stuck out oddly, like a beak.
When enlarged, eyes and feathers became visible.
It was a duck.
I laughed.
“This one was deliberately made as a joke.”
“Exactly. They’re what people on the internet call AI trap images.”
On the screen, the model was still calculating probability values.
Duck 0.49, banana 0.51.
Duck 0.51, banana 0.49.
The AI couldn’t settle on a decision and kept oscillating.
“To resolve these parts, we ultimately need human feedback.”
“Humans?”
“Yes. It’s still in the recognition stage—the early learning state. When the AI feels something is ambiguous, a person has to teach it directly.”
I stared at the screen for a moment.
A muffin that looked like a dog. A duck that looked like a banana.
I could understand why the machine was confused.
“So does that mean we need to hire people on a large scale?”
I wondered if we should recruit part-timers to label the parts the AI found confusing.
“That would be ideal, but it would cost a lot. And even hiring a few hundred people wouldn’t mean much. What we need more is time. The AI industry ultimately comes down to either throwing lots of people at a problem or throwing lots of time at it. But since our data center is a genius, investing time will be more cost-efficient.”
“I see. Understood for now.”
After Team Leader Gong left, I tried guiding the AI myself.
A problem the AI found confusing appeared.
[What is this?]
It was an ambiguous photo that could be a cat or a cloud.
At a glance it looked like a cat; at another glance, like a cloud.
“Even a person would get confused by this, wouldn’t they?”
Still, looking closely, I could see a cat’s claws.
“This is a cat.”
Click.
I selected cat.
Several more problems filled the screen.
Cheeseburger / rocky cliff.
Car front / smiling human face.
Some were easy; some were a little confusing.
“This is actually fun once you start solving them.”
Solving these problems was itself the act of teaching the AI.
Click.
Click.
How many had I solved?
I glanced at the clock and realized it was the time I had scheduled to talk with Illys.
“Illys will be waiting.”
I took out the smartphone that connected to the Nano World and plugged it into a C-type cable.
That way I could view the Nano World on the large TV.
“Hmm.”
But for a moment, I paused.
I looked at the smartphone and the C-type jack.
Connected to the TV, the Nano World screen was still displayed as usual.
A mysterious smartphone that maintained its normal functions while remaining linked to the Nano World at the same time.
I toyed with the cable between my fingertips.
Would it work if I connected it to the computer as well?
It worked with a TV, so why wouldn’t it work with a computer?
Normally, connecting a smartphone to a computer made it automatically recognized as an external storage device.
“It should work, right…?”
A faint unease crept in.
Was I about to do something reckless for no good reason?
But the large TV in front of me seemed to egg me on, as if telling me to try it.
If the TV worked, why wouldn’t the computer?
I remembered the pride I felt every time I saw Illys’s face on that TV screen.
Perhaps the smartphone had hidden functions I still didn’t know about.
I rummaged through the desk drawer and pulled out a C-type–to–USB adapter.
C-type into the smartphone.
USB into the computer.
It was a simple action, yet my hands trembled slightly.
“Here goes.”
I plugged the C-type end into the smartphone and slowly pushed the USB end into the computer port.
In that instant, the computer monitor flickered and a notification window appeared.
[A new device has been connected.]
[Recognizing Device…….]
Soon after, a single folder appeared on the desktop.
“Nano… World?”
I moved the mouse and opened the folder labeled Nano World.
The folder was completely empty.
As a test, I dragged an image from the computer into it.
The image copied over as naturally as it would to any external drive.
“Well, same as usual.”
That was when it happened.
Bzzzzzt.
The smartphone vibrated.
The caller was, of course, Illys.
“Constellation? The Holy Relic… it says it’s been linked?”
The Holy Relic linked?
I asked for a detailed explanation.
“The Holy Relic has been linked? What does that mean?”
“Right now, a strange picture is floating on one of the Holy Relics… It looks a bit like a dog, and a bit like food… Hmm. It’s ambiguous.”
“Ah!”
Hearing Illys’s description, I understood exactly what had happened.
When I put a photo into the Nano World folder, that image had been delivered through the Holy Relic on the Nano World side.
A file from reality was now visible inside the Nano World as well.