The efficient frontier of AI models

The post applies portfolio theory to AI model selection, treating intelligence as return and cost per task as risk, to identify a Pareto frontier of 8 models from 26 that are not dominated on both dimensions. It ranks frontier models by "points per dollar" above the best free model (K2 Horizon), finding GPT-6 Luna most efficient on token cost alone, Beam 1.0 or GPT-6.1 Terra when a well-paid person is waiting, and MiMo-V2.6-Pro under a minimum-score constraint. It also flags where the analogy breaks: you cannot hold a fraction of a model on a single task or lever up, and cost is not known in advance since long agent sessions can cost 6 to 11 times a typical one.