I feel like we don’t talk enough about how five years ago the only people doing interesting things with “AI” were researchers and big tech employees optimizing algorithms, and now everybody has powerful AI systems available to them on demand via an API or in practically every tool.

— Joe Fabisevich (@mergesort.me) January 15, 2026 at 4:17 PM

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When I worked at Twitter, I worked across many teams and was involved in features across the platform. There was one thing I could never wrap my head around though — the AI¹ that powered the Home timeline. I could feel when the quality of my feed dropped or things felt worse, but it was all qualitative and I couldn’t explain why. I simply didn’t have the expertise to explain why, nor the skills to do anything about it.

Today you don’t have to understand neural nets and tensors to build something with AI. With just an API key, everyone has access to OpenAI and Anthropic’s models and can do amazing things with AI in a way that simply wasn’t possible five years ago. Heck, the barrier to entry is even lower if you consider more no-code interfaces like n8n, Make, and Zapier. Now you have to understand how to work with AI, but previously AI was this mystical domain that was accessible to practically nobody.

As I discussed in The Claude Code Moment, you don’t have to be an AI researcher anymore — you can play, experiment, and prompt your way to making something interesting. It no longer takes weeks of training a model to try something new, all you need is curiosity. You don’t have to tweak parameters or understand neural networks — you just update to the latest version of Claude or GPT-5 and see your results improve. Judging by how many people are building things with AI today versus a few years ago, the barrier to entry has dropped thousands-fold.

This shift from AI being accessible to a few people in labs to anyone on the planet is extraordinary. You no longer need a PhD or a job at Meta or Google to use powerful AI systems to build something valuable, unique, and meaningful. All you need is an internet connection, plus some curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking skills.

I have a core belief that people are ingenious. Given the tools to implement their ideas, there’s no telling what they’ll create. Democratizing access to AI isn’t just about lowering the barriers — it’s about unleashing human creativity at scale — and I find that beautiful and exciting.

We’re living through a historical moment, but we may not even recognize it as such because we’re in the middle of it. Five years ago, practically nobody would have predicted how exponentially AI would penetrate every corner of our lives — and it’s just as hard to predict what the landscape will look like five years from now. People talk about the ChatGPT moment or the more recent Claude Code moment as turning points — but only in hindsight because you must live through a moment to truly understand its impact. Right now, we’re living through a moment where AI has become accessible to everyone, and we’re only beginning to see what becomes possible.

Footnotes

1. Admittedly back then we called it machine learning or deep learning, but it was the bleeding edge of AI. ↩