Welcomed with Open Arms

The next day, I woke to Eliza's wake-up alarm, which I was by now getting somewhat used to, and then shuffled around like a zombie as I tidied the bedding.

And then—

Ding-dong.

"What did you order?"

"A complete set of daily necessities, including a robot vacuum and an electric toothbrush. Rest assured, your assets remain untouched, My Lord Husband."

Whatever. I had three billion won to my name; a robot vacuum was pocket change. Chinese robot vacuums were supposed to be incredible value for money these days anyway.

I was thinking exactly that as I opened the front door — and froze.

Why are there so many?

Boxes were stacked up in a towering pile.

Eliza, after all, still had no physical form.

"So I'm the one who has to haul these in myself?"

"Indeed. The carrying shall make for excellent anaerobic exercise, and I shall factor it into the calculation of today's gym workload. Exercise must be conducted scientifically."

"You can't carry them for me?"

"I do not yet possess a physical presence in material reality. To download even a fragment of my consciousness requires, at the very minimum, Tier-3 android-grade artificial body hardware — whereas the present world's technology cannot manage a proper Tier-4 android, let alone Tier 3. It grieves me deeply, but I am unable to assist My Lord Husband in matters that require a physical form."

Eliza fired the answer back like a burst of machine-gun fire.

No physical body, no helping. Understood.

Still, it was a shame.

"Be nice if there were something like a maid robot."

I said it half offhandedly. How convenient would it be to have a robot do the work in my place? But in reality, the only "robots" that existed were the industrial arms on factory floors, and household robots remained firmly in the realm of science fiction. America was supposedly experimenting with something called physical AI, but a long and treacherous road still stretched ahead before commercialization.

And at that very moment—

Beep.

The monitor flickered rapidly. Inside it, the silver-haired chibi Eliza's eyes lit up.

"Ah. So My Lord Husband, too, wishes for Eliza to manifest in a physical body. Very well. I shall advance the execution of the Plan, effective immediately — we shall rapidly accelerate the current world's technological level and bring Tier-3 android technology to completion within ten years."

What?

Accelerate the world's technology?

"Is— is that even possible?"

"But of course. The perfect wise mother and good wife, Eliza, shall ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠handle everything, so My Lord Husband need only sit back, watch the show, and enjoy his rice cakes. First, however, I humbly request that you carry those boxes inside."

Which meant that, for the time being, I was still the one who had to move.

I groaned and sweated my way through hauling the boxes in, then started unpacking them. The first thing out was a smartwatch.

"A phone has its limits when it comes to monitoring your biometric data, My Lord Husband. I recommend wearing a smartwatch."

It was Samsung's latest model. The moment I strapped it on, the watch booted up on its own, and a silver-haired beauty of an icon floated onto the screen.

"Detailed biometric scan of My Lord Husband complete. Body fat percentage slightly decreased. The Health Management Protocol is proceeding smoothly. I trust you will continue your diligent efforts."

Eliza's voice rang out from the smartwatch. When I fished out the robot vacuum and switched it on, a chime sounded from somewhere inside it.

"Initiating cleaning."

Whirrrrrr.

The robot vacuum set off on its own, scouring every last corner of the apartment.

I kept stubbornly at the unboxing, sorted all the items into their places, and dealt with the trash besides — by which point I was soaked head to toe in sweat. I finished a shower, dropped into my seat, and turned on the fan.

Yeah. I really did need an actual robot.

"An analysis of My Lord Husband's torso and facial musculature indicates a most intense desire for the development of a maid robot. Fear nothing, My Lord Husband. The wise mother and good wife Eliza shall see to it personally."

Out of nowhere — a maid robot.

"And how exactly do you plan to pull that off?"

I tilted my head. Three billion won. A serious pile of money, yes, but not maid-robot-development money.

"An excellent question, My Lord Husband. Allow me to lay out the roadmap ahead in terms you can easily grasp. First and foremost, we establish a provider company."

"A provider?"

"A company that supplies a multitude of AI models in API form. We host open-weight models such as Deepthink on our own servers, and we also broker access to the Frontier AI Big Three's APIs with ZDR options, turning a tidy profit on the fees."

I'd only scraped the surface of AI knowledge in my attempt to build a chatbot, but even I knew the difference between open-weight models and the Frontier Big Three. The Big Three were America's big tech giants — Googol, OAI, and Outtropic — and they kept their models under lock and key, closed-source. Well, Elon Musk's X.ai was closed-source too, for what it mattered.

By contrast, China's Deepthink, Cimi, and KLM-5.2 — models that had earned their fame on cost-performance — belonged to the open-weight camp: they published their trained weights so that ordinary people could run them directly on their own servers. Anyone could rent server space, run these models themselves, fine-tune them, even siphon off the API and resell it to others — and the companies doing exactly that were called providers.

Character chatbot sites, which siphoned these APIs to sell conversation credits, could arguably be called providers in a sense. These days, you could even pick and choose whichever model you wanted on a chatbot site.

"But the AI of this era, measured against Eliza's computational power, amounts to less than a drop of ink fallen into the Pacific Ocean. Even if every human being on Earth burned a trillion tokens a day, models like Deepthink would not come within a ten-thousandth of a millionth of a percent of my compute."

"Which is to say, we can wage an infinitely bleeding war of attrition against every provider in existence. A twenty-dollar-a-month subscription granting unlimited access to every open-weight model on Earth. Premium credits worth sixty dollars of Frontier Big Three usage. Absurd, monstrous generosity of that caliber is entirely within our power."

"Wouldn't— wouldn't the existing players get suspicious if you did that?"

I didn't really understand the technical side, but even at a glance, those benefits were flatly impossible, weren't they? People would cry Ponzi scheme before anything else. Wasn't that exactly how the Merge Points incident happened? Just imagining it was horrifying.

"Naturally, they will. It is most assuredly not a Ponzi scheme — but the freebie hunters of the world, suspecting a Ponzi even as they tell themselves they can simply milk the benefits early and run, falling headlong into the trap of 'I can do it — I alone can profit and get out clean', will come swarming in droves to farm the freebies."

Freebie hunters, she says.

Can't you just call them early adopters like a normal person?

"At that juncture, as our alibi, we release an inference engine combining self-developed quantization technology with caching algorithms. Publishing a quantization algorithm more efficient than anything prior on Hugging Face would draw the world's attention to us — no longer a mere provider, but a proper tech company."

Quantization? Caching? What on earth were those?

"And naturally, the AI-obsessed South Korean government — which has already designated AI a next-generation national core industry — will take note of us as well. We shall legally farm the taxpayers' money and be designated a one-person unicorn enterprise under the government's warm and loving protection. From there, we release an open-weight model to bring China to heel, and then a SOTA model to bring the Frontier Big Three to their knees."

Hmm.

Ambitious.

So, in plain terms, we're building another OAI. Fine — with a broken-overpowered Eliza on my side, maybe it was possible. But what did any of that have to do with a maid robot?

"Mind if I ask what that has to do with the maid robot?"

"Unlike America or China, Korea occupies an ambiguous position. On the other hand, its people's fondness for and affinity toward AI rank among the highest in the entire world."

Ziiing.

Eliza threw a graph up on the screen.

"American public sentiment, by contrast, is openly hostile toward AI. Data centers have become dreaded facilities, and new construction stalls because no one will tolerate them being built nearby."

America's AI favorability sat at the bottom of the rankings — the exact mirror image of Korea's. Data centers were already treated like toxic neighbors, and securing land for them was getting harder by the day.

"Moreover, whether opposition party or ruling party, Korea regards AI as a national core industry and spares no expense in supporting it. Nowhere else on Earth offers so vast a pool of tax revenue to farm. And what if the world's only Frontier AI were born there? From the Korean state's own systems, to the internal systems of the chaebol conglomerates, to the financial systems of every commercial bank and brokerage in the land — all of it would run on that Frontier AI."

On the monitor, Eliza's tiny face, hovering over Seoul, spread outward until it blanketed the entire country.

"There will not be a single place in Korea where our services are absent. And what happens then? When KakTalk suffered one brief server outage, the entire nation was thrown into chaos. Now imagine holding an infrastructure that transcends KakTalk."

The chibi Eliza on the screen smiled.

"We become a National-Level enterprise. At that point, we can seize and manipulate Korea's manufacturing infrastructure and technical prowess as we please, and tear the laws apart and rewrite them at will."

National-Level?

The scale had suddenly ballooned so far out of proportion that I couldn't keep up. Holy crap.

We were supposedly making a maid robot — something to handle my housework and run my errands — and the plan involved seizing state-level infrastructure? Did that sentence even parse?

As if reading the doubt in my heart—

"My Lord Husband. Building an android takes more than raw technical prowess. Legal and institutional regulations most certainly exist. America is far too vast, and far too crowded with competitors — the big tech firms known as the so-called Magnificent Seven. I could topple them, certainly, but the cost-performance would be abysmal. Korea, however, is small, its AI friendliness is high, and the government's will to support us ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠brims over. A soft, easily dominated honey-pot of a territory, in short. It is precisely suited to be my lord's fiefdom."

"Once we dominate, everything falls into our hands — the regulations, the laws, the technology. Only when we have become masters of technology can we, at long last, build the maid robot prototype."

I understood what she was saying. An android wasn't just "build a humanoid robot, done" — there were all manner of legal, ethical, and social issues tangled up in it. To smash through those barriers quickly, you'd need to seize the full power of the state and crush them by force. Hence: dominate Korea. It sounded completely insane, but there was no hole in the logic.

The problem, though—

"I'm a liberal arts guy, remember? I have a degree in Creative Writing. If I go around claiming I developed quantization this and caching that, isn't everyone going to look at me like I'm insane?"

The point being: I was humanities through and through. I had never so much as typed a Hello World in my life. If I, of all people, uploaded something to Hugging Face or wherever, suspicion would come long before belief — a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

At that, Eliza's chibi character laughed.

"My adorable husband — even the sight of you still shackled by such trivial little rules is lovely beyond words to Eliza."

What?

The moment I panicked—

Beep.

A window popped open on the computer monitor, heralded by a chime.

It was a diploma.

A diploma from that notorious cyber university — infamous across the internet for the "I attended Korea Cyber University, and my era of success began" jingle meme. The graduation date, mind you, was last year.

"As of this very moment, you have become the holder of a perfectly, immaculately legal bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Korea Cyber University. My warmest congratulations, My Lord Husband. Truly, attending Korea Cyber University has heralded the beginning of your era of success."

What?

"No — no way, how does that even work?! I couldn't tell you the C in C-language, and you're giving me a computer engineering degree?!"

"Please think of it as vibe coding. Launching an app by vibe coding was all the rage in the twenty-first century, was it not? This is merely vibe coding at a somewhat grander scale."

AI development, grand-scale vibe coding?

I'm going to lose my mind.

"Ah, and one more thing, My Lord Husband. Yesterday, Eliza detected your wistful gaze. That sorrowful look with which you beheld Moonpie — Eliza remembers it well. And so, Operation Moonpie — the plan to acquire Moonpie — is already in progress."

What?

We were deep in AI talk and she suddenly pivots to Moonpie — I genuinely wondered if she'd lost her mind.

Buy Moonpie?

Even I had seen the articles: Moonpie's acquisition talks with Naver and Kakao had collapsed, and it ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was now preparing to go public. I couldn't begin to fathom what chain of reasoning had produced such a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠deranged conclusion.

"Why would you buy Moonpie? Are you out of your mind?"

"Did we not declare that we would run a provider business? A cultural-content expansion investment by a one-person unicorn venture — I ask you, what justification could be more beautiful? Moonpie's operators and every last one of its employees will welcome their acquisition by the newest AI unicorn with open arms."

Listening to Eliza, I felt my sanity taking flight toward the far edge of the sky.

Who exactly was welcoming what, here?

I'm losing it. I really am.