Beware the Permanent Periphery

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:29:08 +0300

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.

Economics on Bogdan Buduroiu

Beware the Permanent Periphery