I have been writing about AI for quite a while now, but this is probably the first time I genuinely do not know what to think. Not because the technology has suddenly slowed down, but because the rules of the game may be changing.
I wanted to write something lighter today, but I feel like I have to share some thoughts from the last few days. It is getting harder and harder to ignore what is happening around the newest AI models. @pascal_cescato_692b7a8a20 post, 1%, only confirmed that I am not the only person wondering what comes next.
But letโs start from the beginning. Last Friday, well-known technology journalist Adrian Bridgwater asked me for a comment for this article: OpenAI GPT-5.6 Access Restricted. As someone who used to work in media, I know exactly what journalists hope for when they ask for a comment: a quick response, a short quote, and one strong punchline. ๐ But this time, the topic made me stop and think.
Four years that changed everything
In the last few years, the progress of AI has been incredible. We all know that. On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, based on GPT-3.5, and generative AI suddenly became mainstream. It took only a few months, and by January 2023 ChatGPT had already reached around 100 million monthly users.
Even then, people were saying that AI would soon take jobs away from developers. And yet, from todayโs perspective, less than four years later, GPT-3.5 almost feels dumb.
A year later, we were all laughing at vibe coders and contrasting them with REAL software engineers. But then coding agents arrived, and suddenly we all became vibe coders ๐ Okay, we all know that Claude Code or similar tools still will not replace a good developer today, and AI adoption inside companies often leaves a lot to be desired.
But this is still less than four years of LLMs being truly available on the market. What if, in another two or four years, agents really are good enough to write code much better than humans? Where is the limit of this technology?
Where do developers fit in?
I have to admit, I am a typical overthinker. I love analyzing the world and people, and thinking two hundred steps ahead. Of course, developers would still be needed in such a world, but would all of us be needed? Or would a company that used to need 500 engineers suddenly need five? Or just a small group of people training, supervising, and integrating models?
I am a solid senior engineer, and my market advantage is that apart from writing code, I can talk to people. And business desperately needs that. But I am not the kind of person who will lock herself in a basement for a month and dig deep into hardware internals to make LLMs run faster. I am also not someone who will happily spend 12 hours a day in silence working on benchmarks. I admire people like that, but that is definitely not me.
And I am not sure that if LLMs developed much further, my advantage of โbeing able to talk to businessโ would still be an advantage at all. So what should I do? Maybe slowly start looking toward developer advocacy, since that seems to be going well for me? Maybe send my CV to the nearby Biedronka discount store just in case โ they are actually hiring, and I am there every day anyway, sometimes guiding people to products better than the staff ๐
Changes, changes...
But then something started to change. Tokens became much more expensive. Companies started realizing that maybe, for simple tasks, a junior developer might actually make more sense ๐ And seriously, I do not yet see a massive wave of hiring interns, but saving tokens, giving up certain tools, and saying โuse a cheaper model for simple tasksโ has become very common.
And now there is the embargo. First around Mythos and Fable, and now around GPT-5.6. If you missed it, the short version is that access to some of the most advanced AI models is no longer simply โavailable to everyone who can pay.โ It is becoming restricted, limited by geography, organization type, security concerns, or strategic decisions. In practice, this means that not every developer, company, or country can count on equal access to the best models anymore.
I do not know what to think about this. Are these models really so dangerous for critical infrastructure?
Or maybe governments have simply started treating them as a strategic asset, similar to semiconductors? Maybe this is the end of the free AI market?
For developers, at first, it probably will not matter that much. Even if LLM progress stopped at the models we already have today, we would still improve the infrastructure, polish the agents, build better tooling, and continue working quite happily. Maybe for some time the models would even become more stable, with more reliable APIs and better developer experience.
But what happens next? Will working with powerful LLMs be reserved only for selected people? Or selected companies? Or selected countries?
On the other hand... these models are ridiculously expensive. Somebody has to pay for them. It is difficult for me to imagine companies investing billions only to keep their best models locked in a vault forever. They need customers. They need revenue. So maybe this whole "AI embargo" is only temporary? Or maybe governments will eventually step in and treat frontier AI the way they treat strategic infrastructure? Honestly, I have no idea.
So... what happens next?
Maybe it will be like Polish sci-fi writer Rafaล Kosik predicted 20 years ago in his young adult series Felix, Net and Nika โ AI will become unavailable to the public because it will be considered too dangerous, and models will be kept locked away? ๐ Of course, this is an extreme vision, but honestly, nothing surprises me anymore.
Just a year or two ago, we were asking whether AI would replace developers. Today I find myself wondering about something slightly different: will the most powerful AI even remain available to ordinary people?
What do you think? Where is all of this going? I do not want to pretend to be an all-knowing sheriff here, and I am genuinely curious about your perspective.
Also, I will not publish anything next week because I am going on vacation โ like every self-respecting Polish person, to Croatia. This is just a note for those of you who read my posts every Sunday around lunchtime ๐
And if you are from Czechia or somewhere nearby, come to *FrontKon*, where I will be speaking. Letโs high-five there!
Or, if you like, please follow me on LinkedIn.
Top comments (18)
Sylwia, the access question lands differently depending on where you're starting from. from Nigeria, equal access to frontier models was never the baseline โ every API call already crosses an ocean, costs latency that developers in Virginia don't pay and depends on infrastructure that runs on diesel generators because the grid gives 4 hours a day.
The Fable shutdown was a disruption for developers who had it. for developers who were already working around geography and cost, it was confirmation of something already true: the intelligence available to you has never been just a function of what you can pay. it's always been a function of where you are.
what changes now is that developers in Poland and the US are starting to feel what developers in Lagos have always felt. that's not a silver lining. it's just the same map, newly legible.
Daniel, thank you so much for this perspective. I really appreciate you sharing it.
Sitting here in Europe, it's easy to forget that geography itself is a privilege. We often take for granted that we have relatively stable infrastructure and broad access to the latest models.
Interestingly, the discussion in Europe has recently shifted in a different direction. Many people are worried that Europe is becoming increasingly dependent on the US for AI, and that if we fail to keep up with innovation, we'll end up in a much weaker position ourselves.
Your comment is a good reminder that access has never been distributed equally in the first place.
Sylwia, your Biedronka backup plan is solid. I hear the pay is decent and the product knowledge requirement matches yours already.
Jokes aside โ this is the piece I couldn't write. You're inside it, I was watching from 2029. The "where do I fit" question is the one that actually keeps people up at night, and you're one of the few who'll say it out loud without dressing it up.
The 403 on a Monday morning is abstract geopolitics made very, very concrete.
Enjoy Croatia. The embargo will still be there when you get back. So will I, apparently โ glad someone noticed. ๐
Haha, exactly! ๐ From what I've heard, Biedronka has pretty decent benefits tooโprivate healthcare, holiday vouchers... and it is really close to my home, feels almost like remote job ๐คฃ. Sounds like a solid backup plan. ๐
As for the article, I completely agree. None of us really knows how this is going to unfold. We can try to predict the technology, but we're just as likely to be surprised by political decisions as by the models themselves. That's probably the biggest lesson from the last few weeks.
That's the sentence of the week. The technology was always the easier variable.
And honestly, Biedronka private healthcare sounds better than most startup equity packages right now. Keep that CV warm. ๐
Like other pieces you've written, this is a fun read once again!
As a senior dev who also has to handle the business side of communication, i still find myself looking at this purely through a technical lens. it's wild seeing the narrative shift from " AI replacing us " to these weird global access restrictions.
Honestly, i'm just waiting for the current AI bubble to burst so we can finally what the actual sustainable next step looks like, because right i genuinely have no idea where is this gonna go.
Anyway, enjoy Croatia! The embargo and the hype will definitely still be waiting for you when you get back. ๐
Exactly! ๐ A few weeks ago I was joking that AI would soon be running the world and replacing politicians... and then geopolitics stepped in and reminded us who's still in charge. ๐
Thanks! I'll definitely enjoy Croatia. Let's see whether another embargo drops while I'm away. At this point, I wouldn't even be surprised anymore. ๐
AI regulation is crucial and it is required too. While the government is catching up on the regulations, however the AI governance is still missing. The advancement with the AI is good but also the models cannot be released to public like before is what I think. Basically, it has to be regulated and released in a controlled manner.
I agree that some level of regulation is necessary. AI is becoming too powerful to be treated like just another software release.
That said, do you really think the recent decisions by the US government are primarily about safety and responsible regulation? I'm not so sure.
Looking from Europe, it often seems like geopolitics, technological leadership, and economic competition are playing at least as big a role as safety concerns. That's why this whole discussion is so much more complicated than simply "regulation vs. no regulation."
The corporate/government embargo angle is "LOL", but there's a parallel force to consider: the open-source and adversarial ecosystems. Hacking and independent optimization are evolving just as fast. It cannot be quenched; the journey never ends.
Even if frontier centralized models get locked in a vault, local, highly-optimized hardware-native models are getting sharper by the second. And as for AI feeling 'dumb' to a senior developer right now? Give it time. At the rate of execution, emotional intelligence and behavioral nuance might soon be just another programmable layer.
I think the answer is both yes and no. ๐
I completely agree that innovation won't stop. Open-source models will keep improving, local models will become more capable, and people will always find ways to optimize and experiment.
Where I see it differently is that I think you're underestimating what sits behind today's frontier models: enormous GPU clusters, massive proprietary datasets, world-class research teams, and billions of dollars in investment.
So I don't think these restrictions will stop progress, but they may slow it down. And in AI, even a six-month or one-year lead can translate into enormous economic value and strategic advantage.
That's exactly why I think this is as much a geopolitical issue as it is a technological one.
Throughout history, new technologies have often faced initial barriers, centralization, and attempts to control them, yet innovation tends to find a way to spread and evolve anyway, often in unexpected ways.
It is just a continuous cycle of challenge and adaptation.
I completely agree that innovation will keep moving forward, even if we never saw another frontier model released again. There's still an incredible amount of optimization, engineering, and experimentation ahead.
What I'm wondering, though, is whether this is a bit like trying to advance technology without continuing fundamental research in physics. I'm not saying that's what's happening, I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud.
It feels like there's a difference between optimizing what already exists and pushing the actual frontier of knowledge. Maybe both are needed in the long run.
I think there's another possibility.
Even if frontier models become more restricted, software engineering won't stop evolving.
The next competitive advantage may not come from having access to the biggest model, but from giving AI a better understanding of the software system it operates in.
Ownership. Dependencies. Verification. Operational weight. Change impact.
We're increasingly convinced that Open-Source Workspace Intelligence for Software Systems will matter regardless of which frontier model wins.
Yes, I'm completely with you on this. This is actually the part I'm least worried about.
Even if we never saw another frontier model, I think we'd still make incredible progress over the next few years. Better tooling, better software understanding, better context, verification, workflows... there's still so much room for innovation.
My only point is that with new frontier models, that progress would probably be even faster. ๐
Exactly.
That's why we're increasingly thinking about AI engineering as two parallel tracks:
The first expands what AI can do.
The second helps it decide what it should do within a real software system.
I think both will evolve together over the coming years.
You can't replace fundamental law of physics with a trillion-token guess. When the AI embargo or bubble forces a reality check, the high-flying guesses hit a wall & only 1 thing left standing is deterministic, roburst logic. But borrowing your binoculars... The model doesn't know the law of gravity, but it has seen the apple fall a billion times from a million angles. ๐ค Who is actually bridging the foundation or are we just getting better at navigating the fog ?
The access-stratification framing is real, but I think it understates what
happens at the developer level even with full access.
Take the "500 engineers or 5" question. The pivot isn't really how good
the model gets or which tier you can buy. It's whether your output is the
kind a model can write a paragraph about without doing, or the kind that
requires hands on data nobody has published yet. The first category gets
commoditized regardless of whether you have GPT-5.6 or the open-weight
three-versions-behind. The second stays scarce even when everyone has the
frontier model, because the bottleneck moves from "can I generate prose
about X" to "can I produce a receipt for X that the wrapper can't
fabricate".
Geopolitical lock-in might then decide who runs the cheapest version of
category one. Category two is a different conversation, and it's the one
I'd want to be in either way.
"I genuinely don't know what to think" is honest, and probably the correct
stance for now. The planning move underneath it might be: stop indexing
on model tier, start indexing on which of your outputs leaves a receipt
nobody else can hand over.