My plan was simple: hedge my family’s access to intelligence by building a lo...

My plan was simple: hedge my family’s access to intelligence by building a local AI box on my desk. But last week, I finally did the math on rising hardware prices and exploding model sizes, and I realised it may be harder than expected. Between US export controls gating frontier models by individual passports and a brutal global scramble for scarce memory, the window for individuals to secure their footing is closing. The consensus inside the bubble points to a tight timeline (somewhere between 12 to 18 months) before the economic game permanently changes. In this week’s post I describe how access is solving itself through open weights. The real bottleneck is capital and a real-time understanding of the economic machine. I'm shifting my side-project focus to building an auto-research loop of AI agents to model this complex financial system, not to change the world, but to protect my community before the music stops. Read the full piece here: open.substack.com/pub/adlrocha/p…