Self-building AI no longer feels far away. There are already many ways to do it. The question is no longer if, but how you hand over control, and when. Early in the month I read that ByteDance released an open model that handles end to end tasks, no longer one prompt at a time. That's where the thought hit me: this might be the most open era of AI, maybe ever. And it might already be ending.
AI fog
When everything develops this fast, long-term projections become impossible. I've heard the term "AI fog" used somewhere, and it feels right. You can't see ahead at this pace, and that amplifies the effect of everything else too.
The US is the best example. Less than a year ago their AI future looked open. Now the politics have made almost a full 180. That's what the fog means in practice. A full political reversal is also possible at this pace, in any direction.
I have a hard time seeing a state-controlled almighty AI that doesn't become 1984 or a Black Mirror episode. At the same time there are real reasons why fully open isn't good either. That's exactly what makes it so hard. There is no obvious right answer, just a development moving faster than anyone can respond to.
Regulation always comes after
This has happened before. When industrial automation and the first robots came to the factories, the development was so fast that regulation couldn't keep up. In many places the rules, laws and protocols came only after dozens if not hundreds of lives had been lost.
And that phase wasn't short. It took years, for many a whole working life, before the protections and rules were really in place.
That sounds familiar. No system has ever been perfect, least of all when the pace is this fast. The difference now is that it's not one factory floor at a time.
Nothing is sacred
Then I saw the Ferrari Luce, their newest design and their first electric car. Ferrari was always "peak automotive design". The customer is assumed to have 640,000 dollars. So why does the car look like someone is trying to save on costs? The taillights don't tell you it's a Ferrari. Nothing in the car does, except the logo.
The important part is that this didn't happen with this model. It happened behind the scenes, long before. It's not just the size of the company. It's some weird combination of structure, politics, bureaucracy and a million other things that seems to be taking over company after company. The decay is gradual and invisible, compromise by compromise. The only sudden part is the moment the result rolls out. Apple is the same. The general understanding is that iOS 26 made the operating system worse. You can see it in how they are now pulling back and polishing out the mistakes for 27. If not even Ferrari and Apple are safe from enshittification, then nothing is.
Same forces, same direction
That's why the Ferrari belongs in the same post as AI politics. It's the same forces. Scale, bureaucracy and politics take something that was open or personal and make it generic and controlled. The cars became blobs. The phones got worse. And AI is heading into exactly the same machine, just much faster.
You can already see it in how the value concentrates. If AI is this valuable already, how do you even invest in it? And if the value is inflated but keeps growing anyway, what happens to all other values? Technically you can see the same movement inside the companies themselves. Previously separate parts are being merged into bigger wholes, SpaceX and xAI as the biggest example. Everything consolidates.
Make it or break it
If democracy is the biggest obstacle for AI, does that mean we are approaching autocracy if we don't start restricting it? I don't have an answer. But I notice the question no longer feels like describing a movie. This might really be the thing that makes it or breaks it, meaning makes the world much better, or not.
What I realized in May: the open era doesn't end gradually in front of your eyes. The decay happens behind the scenes, and through the AI fog you can't see it coming. Then one day it rolls out like a Luce. A smash, and it's already over.