This week’s issue of "The Small Signal" explores the build vs. buy question for AI models: 🏆 Korea’s AI tournament - and what Europe can learn from it 🏛️ Germany’s open-source plan and latest model (#Kolibri) 💼 Bridgewater’s differentiated intelligence anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #41

Korea’s AI Squid Game - Join, don’t build - Taste beats scale

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This week’s small signals help thinking about "scaling laws" & the potential for an AI bubble: 📈 Scale-dependent progress: the steady march that was mostly capex 🕯️ Losing my religion 2.0: Julian Togelius roots for the problems 📋 The silicon sample anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

This week’s issue of "The Small Signal" covers: 🦞 The mud lobster data center: infrastructure that can leave 🛰️ Chinese Sputnik moments: four percent & other surprises 🧪 3D-printed labs: when the instrument is a file Read here: anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #39

Mud lobster datacenter - Chinese Sputnik moments - Printed labs

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This week's "small signals" in my newsletter cover: 🧩 The openness stack: sixteen rivals agree on a vocabulary 🎭 Decentralised alignment, stress-tested by Bittensor 👻 Ghost workers and risk scores: AI enters the treasury anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #38

The openness stack - Alignment, stress-tested - Ghost workers

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Last Sunday, I queued at Helsinki’s historic amusement park, waiting to ride a wooden roller coaster that is still braked by hand. The Small Signal #37 is about the thoughts I had on AGI and our human potential for fun while I was standing there. anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #37

On OpenAI’s Astra, and the ride that still needs a human

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This week’s "small signals" in my newsletter cover: 🤝 An embedded equilibrium? AI agents cooperate with their own kind 🦆 The licence is not the strategy: DuckDB, HF, and the price of maintenance 📜 Human rights as an alignment target in AI training anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #36

Agentic cooperation - Price of maintenance - Human rights as alignment target

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This week’s small signals in my newsletter: 🔥 The sand battery & the economics of delay 🎵 Spotify’s 1,000-stream threshold and the $40 million transfer ⚖️ Disinformation as a competition law problem Find the full issue here: anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

This week’s small signals in my newsletter cover: 🗣️ The machine that out-talks human champions 🏘️ Ideology at the end of the street 🗂️ Municipal data gaps and the missing bidders (plus a newsletter recommendation) Find the full issue here: anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

This week's issue of my weekly newsletter covers these "small signals": 🔒 Acemoglu’s theorem: automation and the logic of repression 🎬 12 states versus the Ellison media empire 📊 The diversification myth: concentration in the portfolio Read here: anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #33

Acemoglu's automation theorem - Hollywood's antitrust fight - Portfolio diversification

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This week’s small signals cover: 📉 The 25 percent firm: AI-native startups and the end of headcount growth 🇨🇳 Involution with AI agents: China’s one-person company boom 🍴 Open by necessity: export controls and the fork-count gap anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #32

AI-native startups - Involution with AI agents - Open by necessity

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This week’s "small signals" in my Substack newsletter: 🌐 Building the open metaverse browser before proprietary platforms lock it in 🍠 When AI mistakes pounded yam for mashed potato 🌎 Latin America chooses a regulatory lane: rights-based & risk-tiered anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #31

Open Metaverse Browser - AI Mistakes - Brussels Effect in Latin America

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Issue #30 of the "The Small Signal" looks upstream: at how we train large AI models, how we govern openness, and what that does to human rights. 📐 Item Response Scaling Laws 📚 The politics of digital infrastructure ⚖️ Amnesty on human rights and AI anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #30

Item Response Scaling Laws - The Politics of Open Infrastructures - Unlawful by Design

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Issue #29 of The Small Signal: 🦀 OpenClaw and the modular agent: separability as a design choice 🌐 State media in LLM training data: the language you use shapes the answer you get 🛠️ Citizen hackathon as civic infrastructure or participation theatre? anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #29

Modular agents - State media and LLMs - Citizen hackathons

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This week’s small signals: 🔑 Digital freedom beyond the consent box 🔬 Foucault and the government of patterns ₿ Unmasking Satoshi: myth, authority, and the limits of trustless systems Read the full issue here: open.substack.com/pub/anselmku...

The Small Signal #28

Digital Freedom as Networked Autonomy - Foucault and AI - Satoshi

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This week’s "small signals" in my newsletter: 🚫 The politics of technological refusal 🧬 Population ethics and the monoculture problem 🌿 What ecosystem resilience tells us about AI infrastructure anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #26

Techno‑Negative - AI Monoculture and Ethics - How to Spread Risk

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Your feed sounds different now: same hedges, same rhythms. A paper this month says that is not accidental, it is what AI safety training produces. New issue: AI monoculture, Japan's industrial policy, and why the salaryman might be the job of the future. anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #25

Japan and Chips - Salarymen in the Age of AI - Alignment as Monoculture

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2027 wird in vier der fünf größten EU-Mitgliedsstaaten gewählt. Worauf Europa sich einstellen sollte, haben Professor Andrea De Petris und ich mir mit Blick auf Frankreich und Italien genauer angeschaut. 👇👇👇 www.cep.eu/de/eu-themen...

Schicksalsjahr 2027: Das Superwahljahr und die Zukunft der Europäischen Union | cep - Centrum für europäische Politik

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Issue #24 of The Small Signal: 🏛 Reading AOC's MSC speech when OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are heading for IPO 💰 IMF on tokenisation 🚆 Zero-knowledge proofs for ticketing 📋 Paper: EU digital rules are centralised on paper, fragmented in practice anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #24

Antitrust as Security - Tokenised finance - Decentralised identity & enforcement

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Issue #23 of The Small Signal considers digital democracy at human scale: 🏘 Digital citizen participation in East Germany 🇯🇵 Japan's Team Mirai uses open-source tech to make policy formation legible 👍 The engineer behind Facebook's like button on AI anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #23

How digital democracy looks like in Saxony, in Japan, and in Silicon Valley

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The Small Signal #22 🗣 Benefit-sharing: A community in Kenya chose NOODL over CC0 for their language data 🇪🇺 Europe has 23% of open source contributors but not the institutions to turn that into sovereign infrastructure 💾 On SciOp & Google DiLoCo anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #22

Our Language, our Data - Open Source Talent - Distributed by Design

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New issue of The Small Signal. Three signals on what "open" AI actually enables: 📊 Open-weight models coding texts 🇮🇳 India's Digital Futures Lab built a matrix for thinking about AI openness by layer 💾 What is local-first software? anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #21

Replication (in political science) - Sovereignty (in India) - Ownership (in software)

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New issue of The Small Signal, covering: 🛰 TinyIceNet runs on a satellite chip, no cloud required 🏭 Germany's environment ministry notes that industrial AI is already specialized and embedded 🤖 AI agents that design their own edge models Read here: anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #20

TinyIceNet - German GPTs - AI Agents and Von Neumann Constructors

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I mean, speeches can help, but yeah, this.

Anselm Küsters@anselmkuesters.bsky.social · 5mo ago

European tech sovereignty is not about speeches; it's mainly about mundane things like vulnerability databases. This week's "The Small Signal" covers: 🔐 Luxembourg's GCVE goes live 📉 Europe and open source talent ⚖️ Germany's sovereign cloud tender anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

European tech sovereignty is not about speeches; it's mainly about mundane things like vulnerability databases. This week's "The Small Signal" covers: 🔐 Luxembourg's GCVE goes live 📉 Europe and open source talent ⚖️ Germany's sovereign cloud tender anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #19

European CVE - Open Source Plumbing - Cloud Tenders

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May Day. New issue of "The Small Signal" covers: gig workers whose employers exist only in court proceedings, a century of rising firm concentration across 10 economies & AI swarms designed to manufacture consensus. Also: 60 years of basic income research. anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #18

Swarms of Parasitic AI - Gig Work - Tales of Concentration

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AI chip manufacturing emissions rose 7% in 2024, after a 30% decline in 2023. The driver is HBM demand. New issue of "The Small Signal" looks at that, plus the EU's DMA review, and Sara Hooker's essay on why the scaling era is losing reliability. anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #17

AI’s Material Costs - DMA Review - Europe After Scaling

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New issue of "The Small Signal": AI renegotiates Coase's theory of the firm. China's internet, told through six lives. And a German study puts a number on what choice is worth: 8.9%. Three signals. One thread connecting them: agency. Full issue: anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

The Small Signal #16

New Coasean Bargain - China’s Internet - Choice

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Freue mich, dass mein neuestes CEP-Briefing heute veröffentlicht wurde, das sich aus EU-Perspektive mit den sicherheitspolitischen Herausforderungen in der Region von der Arktis bis in die Nordsee beschäftigt. Freue mich auf Reaktionen und Feedback. www.cep.eu/de/eu-themen...

Kafka's theatre director had to father his own actors. He ended up changing nappies. The one-person unicorn follows the same logic. New issue of "The Small Signal" on AI, total control & why Google's Gemma 4 being open is not the same as it being usable: anselmkuesters.substack.com/p/the-small-...

"Doch Unicorns heißen nicht umsonst so: mythische Wesen, selten und wunderlich. Ein-Personen-Unicorns wären mythische Wesen zweiter Ordnung." @anselmkuesters.bsky.social in seinem überaus lesenswerten Kurz-Essay zu Kafka und KI bei @netzpolitik.org - check it out: netzpolitik.org/2026/kafka-u...