I prefer interacting with good AI customer service agents. I appreciate having the option to talk to a human, but I’ll probably take a subpar AI agent experience over sitting in a queue for 30 minutes only to transferred around departments anyways.

I think clamouring for “sovereign frontier AI” is what “middle powers” shouldn’t do. Instead, they should be looking for (and funding) Pareto-optimal models to serve their critical sectors of the economy. You don’t need Fable running triage on customer support tickets, you don’t need Kimi K3 to manage your e-commerce catalogue.

Europe is already paying “cloud rent” to the US by way of Amazon, Visa, and Uber. European companies dumping billions in token spend into US labs would be an unfathomable level of capital extraction. Seeing Mistral’s push to integrate deep into industry, releasing their Forge for fine-tuning models, gives me hope that European corporations and governments will either find, or fine-tune their Pareto-optimal soveregin models.

I tried to define what a Cassandra should be, but could only come up with what it shouldn’t be, and that’s pessimism-as-a-service, or seniority-driven friction.

Every time you deploy a heterodox opinion in your company’s channels, you’re spending capital. That capital is earned back, with interest, when your heterodox opinion is proven right. Deploy that capital intelligencly.