@adlrocha - The 18-months Deadline
@adlrocha Beyond The Code
SubscribeSign in
@adlrocha - The 18-months Deadline<br>On surviving the Great AI Capital Shift, and our last chance to make useful work<br>adlrocha<br>Jul 05, 2026
Share
For six months I’ve been trying to hedge my (and my family’s) access to intelligence. Open models, local inference, a box on my desk that runs a decent model without asking anyone’s permission, you know, the kind of things you’ve seen me write about in previous posts. Last week, I finally did the math on what realistic local local inference would require, and while it helped me make a better sense of the current state of affairs, it made me realise that there’s a limit on what local inference can achieve without the right budget.<br>Limiting myself to the 10k I wanted to make available for hardware purchases, with the current rising prices, and the increasing size of the models, wouldn’t end up in anything more than a baseline insurance for the worst case scenario. And my current hardware may already be covering for that.<br>If I wanted to secure my access to intelligence at a bigger scale maybe I was framing the problem in the wrong way.
Two powers, one weapon
To understand why everyone is feeling like we are living a “now-or-never” moment , it helps to stop reading this as a technology story and start reading it as a power one. Intelligence, and the underlying hardware required for it has become the new strategic resource, the way oil was in the last century, and (as you all know) two states have worked that out.<br>Let’s first have a look at what is happening in the US. In June the government issued an export directive suspending all foreign-national access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, any foreign national, inside or outside the country, including Anthropic’s own foreign-national employees. Then this week, Anthropic was allowed to redeploy Fable 5 once the mechanics were worked out (and after making the model dumber through the attached guardrails). This chain of events were quite disturbing for me as I was following them: so you are telling me that a state can reach into a private lab and decide, at the level of individual passports, who gets the frontier and who doesn’t. Whether the lab wanted to is almost beside the point, the capability to gate access at the border now exists and has been used once, which means it can be used again.<br>That’s the first move in any resource war: capture the point of production, then decide who’s allowed to drink from it. But to make matter worse, market dynamics are also shifting who gets access to resources. Everyone is trying to get their hands into some hardware, which have forced Apple to raise base prices around 20% overnight, MacBook Pro from $1,699 to $1,999, Mac Studio from $1,999 to $2,499, and Blackwell cards jumped $400 to $900 in a single day at Microcenter. It is a fight between data centre operators, companies, individuals, and consumer electronics manufacturers for the limited resource required for intelligence (memory at this moment). Owning the compute is owning the means of producing intelligence, and we are all bidding for the same scarce memory at once.<br>So the states wall off the frontier from the top, while everyone else scrambles for the substrate from underneath, and the two dynamics feed each other. This is why people are rushing themselves (and urging others) to buy compute immediately, because it feels like the window of opportunity is closing, and access will become increasingly unreachable for individuals.<br>What makes me wonder, if we look at the situation with the lenses of a “race to get yourself access to intelligence”, is China actually the bad guy in this game? There are clearly two great powers doing what great powers always do when a new source of leverage appears, wielding it, walling it, and priming their publics to fear the other side’s version of it. The export bans, the fabs, the distillation cold war… they are both using the kind of nasty tricks once can think of but in the 21st century. None of them are free of sin, but the models coming from China at least are open (otherwise no one in the West would know about or be using them. This is the thesis from the Z.ai founder about why everyone knows their models but not Bytedance’s one).<br>And where does that leave a European? Nowhere, honestly. We have no frontier lab except Mistral, no leverage in the fight, and no seat at the table where these decisions get made. I feel like we are not even participating in this war. I’m a bystander in a country that either buys closed US models that can be export-controlled away from me by directive, or finds another way to hold intelligence that no directive can reach. If at least I was based in SF or NYC, where I could meet the right people, and be exposed to the right ideas, but this is not the case.<br>Which is the whole reason open source has to win, and why it is what I am optimising for (acknowledging that I have an obvious bias...