---
title: "Warming Up for the Tampere Investment Fair — Sami Miettinen on Paasipodi #73"
titleOriginal: "Tampereen sijoitusmessujen etkot ft. Sami Miettinen | #paasipodi 73"
description: "Both men are speaking at the Tampere investment fair the following week and neither has prepared, so they rehearse live. The result is the clearest account yet of how Miettinen actually uses AI for investing — foundation model, harness, memory and curated context as four separate layers — plus the €5,000 newborn pension, the small-cap drought, and a full-throated argument for building data centres in Finland."
format: "podcast"
show: "#paasipodi"
episode: "#73"
hosts: ["Martin Paasi"]
date: 2026-05-14
duration: "58:32"
language: "fi"
original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx940H9EVLQ
relatedEpisode: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/paasipodi-71-budget-framework-2026/
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/paasipodi-73-tampere-investment-fair-warmup/
---

# Warming Up for the Tampere Investment Fair — Sami Miettinen on Paasipodi #73

Both men are on the bill at the Tampere investment fair the following week — Paasi giving a
keynote, Miettinen on the panel about AI's effect on investing — and both admit on air that
they have not prepared. So they rehearse live.

**Paasi's keynote.** He has, he says, either not prepared at all or prepared for over ten
years, depending on how you count: the talk is an evergreen he has given more times than
anything else he has, and this outing is its honourable farewell, refreshed with new figures
because he noticed the worked example was a couple of notches off. Miettinen's objection is
that an hour of "buy low-cost index funds and don't sell them" gets repetitive, and pushes
him towards the sharper version — the **€5,000 newborn**. Put five thousand euros into a fund
at birth, leave it alone, and it buys that child an extra average Finnish pension.

The arithmetic underneath is the part worth repeating. On a median Finnish salary of about
€3,200 a month, total employment cost is around €4,000, of which roughly a thousand euros a
month goes into the pension system — twelve thousand a year, a hundred and twenty thousand a
decade, for your entire working life. Finland's pension system is perfectly decent, Miettinen
says, but it is extremely expensive relative to what a single €5,000 investment at birth would
achieve. Paasi's slogan for it, workshopped on air: **from grandpa to baby, not baby to
grandpa**. He notes that a Finnish family organisation has floated a comparable baby-fund
scheme, and suggests it would work better in low-cost index funds.

## The layer model: how to actually use AI for investing

The core of the episode is Miettinen's architecture, and it is the clearest statement of it he
has given on the show. Four layers, and most people only ever touch one.

**The foundation model** — Opus, GPT, Qwen, Gemma — is the hammer. Miettinen's insistence is
that these are **mean-reverting** models: fed an enormous volume of human-produced text, they
settle on the middle of the village. That is not a defect, it is the point, and it is exactly
why they are so effective at coding, at legal interpretation, at slides and at images — all
bounded domains where the human consensus is the right answer. What it also means is that they
are *not* good at predicting share prices, which the models themselves told Paasi when he
interrogated them, and hopeless at anything genuinely novel.

**The harness** is the provider's control layer sitting on top of the base model whenever you
reach it over the internet — Anthropic's, OpenAI's, Google's. It is invisible and it shapes
every answer. Run a model locally and the harness is gone: the model is alone in the box with
you, unable to ask an American or Chinese owner how it ought to answer. Miettinen finds this
genuinely liberating rather than sinister, because it puts the control layer under your own
hand.

Paasi's contribution here is his own experiment. He spent a night bombarding the four Hello
Humans models about what they know, what they do not, where the fog begins and whether they
remember being given their guardrails — the answer to the last being no. He also runs Google's
best private model, **Gemma 4 26B**, on a 64GB laptop with no internet connection at all, and
notes with some delight that Sami Miettinen turns out to be baked into its weights: a certain
kind of immortality. Miettinen's answer on the models' centrism is that the Chinese model is
not reverting to the *human* mean but to a different one, which is why four models beat one —
two American, one European, one Chinese.

**Memory and curated context** is where Miettinen says the value actually sits, and where
almost nobody bothers. Asking a base model "how will Nokia do" is an absurd question, because
what it holds is a vague human consensus from six months ago. The work is bringing current
facts in, then a hypothesis — the share has moved not because of 9G networks but because of
optical data transmission selling hard into data centres — then curating that as a data point
in your own store, then expanding it with searches from trusted sources, then extending the
thesis outward: do the American hyperscalers use Nokia components in their data centre
buildouts? Layer that over agents like Samantha and Stöbä that retain it across long horizons
and you get something that is not remotely the same thing as a one-shot question to a chat box.

His planned five-minute demo at Tampere follows that structure: his AI workers debating a
listed stock the audience cares about — why Wärtsilä has run so hard, with diesel generators
as backup power for AI complexes as the partial answer, extended to what that implies for
Alphabet, whose cloud demand exploded and whose search business conspicuously failed to die.
Then Claude in Excel analysing his own portfolio and arguing the case for *selling* each
holding. Then simulations of his limited partnership commitments — he is unusually a direct
private investor in American private equity funds, with the ten-plus-two year capital call and
distribution cycle to model. His aside on that is a good one: if you want to listen to a
finance professional, make sure they have stood on every corner — client, seller, service
provider and investor — because only then do they see how the thing actually works.

Miettinen's larger irritation is with the columnists. People who do not pay for the models,
prompt them badly, and then generalise their own incompetence into a property of the system —
who are, he suspects, equally bad at giving instructions to humans. The counterpart of his
**delete, delegate, do** framework is that AI collapses all three into one interactive
structure: you delete the bad ideas intelligently, you delegate to agents, and you still do —
and the people who operate this way see their productivity compound while everyone else's
pyramid falls over. Finland's active wage bill is over a hundred billion euros, and his blunt
framing is that this is the market you are competing in.

## Small caps, big caps, and the Finnish market

The exchange rose around 35–40 per cent last year, and Miettinen's own equity savings account
— which forces him into direct holdings, since index funds are not permitted in the wrapper —
did well on Alphabet, Shopify, Nokia, Neste, Wärtsilä and Nordea. He is candid about the
scale: the thousand-euro dividend punts that doubled are pleasant but immaterial, and he
declines the stock influencer's trick of showcasing whichever of thirty tickers happens to be
up. One of them, a healthcare holding, is down.

The genuine puzzle is that small caps did not follow, and small software companies in
particular went backwards — so investors who backed small Finnish firms out of conviction,
active ownership or patriotism are looking at minus five while everyone else has plus forty.
Miettinen's frame is **Fama and French**: small companies cheap on price-to-book have returned
close to 10 per cent real over 88 years. That has failed recently, and his reading is that
Fama and French were locally right but not globally right — strip the Magnificent Seven out of
the US market and it went nowhere either. The usual pattern is that the large caps run first
and money rotates down; he is not certain it will this time, and notes drily that Aalto teaches
every anomaly to be permanent.

## The data centre argument

The episode's strongest passage is Miettinen against the sceptics — Risto Siilasmaa among them
— who argue that ten billion euros of data centre investment is the wrong kind of investment
and will consume Finland's electricity.

His answer has three parts. First, the alternative is not a better investment; the alternative
is aggressively waiting by the telephone while Finland sinks. The AI megatrend is here, it
requires compute, and Finland could be a compute superpower. Second, the electricity objection
inverts: yes, five gigawatt-scale data centres consume power and prices may rise for a period —
but **demand is what makes new generation worth building**. Finland has a roadmap to double
clean electricity production by 2035, and that roadmap exists only if there are buyers. This,
he says, is the ABC of economic growth: when demand arrives, you can sell. Third, the ancillary
benefits are real and stackable — land sales, construction, connections, a couple of hundred
jobs in a region that needs them, tax revenue — and the arrival of the operators can be
*conditioned*: on funding professorships at Aalto, on locating design work in Finland, on
supporting a country that already holds a remarkable share of the world's quantum computing
capacity. Finland is at the outermost tip of the spear on several of these things and is
declining the investment that would let it build on them.

His illustration of the reasoning he is arguing against comes from the Uniper case, where he
has been sitting through the parliamentary inquiry: some parties hold that the taxpayer lost
nothing on a six-billion-euro disposal, because Fortum is now profitable. Six billion below
the line is six billion of production capacity that would otherwise have existed. If it truly
costs nothing, he offers, let a consortium take Fortum's generation capacity off the
taxpayer's hands — the remaining company will still turn a profit, so nobody will have lost
anything.

## The political section

The episode's most partisan stretch turns on a single statistic Miettinen attributes to the
employers' confederation: divide Finns into ten income deciles and **only the top two are net
contributors of tax**; the other eight are net recipients. His argument from it is that the
people the country most depends on are treated worst, that he can find no logic in it beyond
group identity, and that the same instinct produced the option taxation rule the previous
episode covered. Paasi widens it into the intellectual history — class antagonism as a
constitutive part of the tradition, and the observation, offered from both sides, that the
payers stop paying once they stop being able to.

Miettinen's advice to listeners is the same one he gave in episode 71 and he repeats it as
fact rather than opinion: the money has run out, transfers will be cut from here to the
foreseeable future regardless of who governs, and you defend your family best by reducing your
dependence on cash flows the state decides — which argues for supporting lower taxes funded by
a substantially smaller state.

Paasi takes the last word for the AI case instead: Finland has a thousand-billion-euro
opportunity in front of it, the money has arrived to build, and the thing simply has to be
done. Growth works like stacking Lego — one thing creates the next, which grows the first.

Original recording (#paasipodi): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx940H9EVLQ

From the same session: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/paasipodi-71-budget-framework-2026/

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, guest on #paasipodi #73 — Warming Up for the Tampere Investment Fair — Sami Miettinen on Paasipodi #73, 2026-05-14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx940H9EVLQ. Record: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/paasipodi-73-tampere-investment-fair-warmup/.