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While You Were Watching the Chatbots
Over the past two years, Canada quietly rebuilt the question of who controls its artificial intelligence. Not in one announcement. That's the point. There was never a single moment loud enough to make you look up. The decisions arrived in fragments — a Christmas Eve letter, a contribution agreement with a file number, a press release at a university most people don't follow, an MOU with the important parts blacked out. Each fragment was, on its own, small enough to ignore. Together they red
Read storyFounder Reality is written by George Pu — $10M+ portfolio built by 27, no investors, no co-founders.
Latest Essays
What I'm thinking about right now.
Fine-tuning your own AI doesn't cost $35,000. It cost us about $50.
Two A100 graphics cards. Spinning quietly in a Google datacenter. Five hours of training. About $50 in compute. That's what it cost us to fine-tune our own 4-billion-parameter AI model this week. The base model went from 30% accuracy on the tasks we care about to 98%. Read any article on fine-tuning costs and you'll see numbers between $5,000 and $35,000. One blog called it a 'CFO conversation.' Another listed 'hidden expenses' that could double your initial estimate. A third quoted team
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Your ChatGPT and Claude Conversations Are Court Evidence
Greg Brockman's journal became Exhibit 161 this week. The next chapter writes itself. Someone's ChatGPT history becomes Exhibit 162. That sentence sounds like speculation. It isn't. The infrastructure is already in place. The court orders are already in place. The only thing missing is a famous enough defendant for the headline to break the way Brockman's did. The court order most people haven't read In May 2025, Magistr
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The Journal That Exposed the President
Greg Brockman keeps a diary. Not a metaphor. A literal, decades-long, type-into-his-laptop journal that he started in college when he was deciding what to study. He kept it through Stripe. He kept it through founding OpenAI with Musk and Altman. He kept it through the brawl for control of the company in 2017 - the fight that's now being relitigated in a San Francisco courtroom. This week, his journal became Exhibit 161. Hun
Read essayFrom the series · The AI Displacement Series
The Path Forward
This is Chapter 7 of 7 in the AI Displacement Series.
More on Sovereign Compute
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
I Tried to Buy a Mac Studio This Week. Here's What Happened.
I've been running our AI stack on a rented L4 GPU on Google Cloud. $700 a month. Serves a Qwen 14B model. Fine for production. Not fine for what I want to do next. I want to self-host a 70B open-source model on my own hardware. Run it locally. Write about the whole process in public. Eventually help other founders do the same. The plan was simple. Mac Studio. M4 Max. 128GB unified memory. Quiet enough to sit on a desk. Fast en
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AI Real Estate: From Apartment to Mansion
AI Real Estate: From Apartment to Mansion A $3,999 Mac Studio runs a 122 billion parameter AI model on your desk. Running the same model on AWS costs roughly $5 an hour. About $3,700 a month if you leave it on. The Mac pays for itself in five weeks. A $3,999 Mac Studio runs a 122B parameter AI model locally. Running that same model on AWS: $5/hour. ~$3,700/month if you leave it on. The Mac pays for itself in five weeks. I
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Free at the Base, Paid at the Frontier
Open source AI didn't die. It ran out of sponsors.
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Canada's AI hardware reality check — what's actually available vs. what founders think they can buy.
GPU shipping is the tell. If you can't physically own the compute, you don't own your AI stack.
I only write code when it's 10/10 important. Slowing down is the real productivity move in 2026.
Mac Studio supply is crunched. Apple's quietly rationing M3 Ultra — AI builders feel it first.
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