231+ Essays

Essays

Deep thinking on building businesses designed to own forever. Not how-to content. Decision logs, frameworks, and pattern recognition.

George Pu

$10M+ built. Still own everything.

Not sure where to start?

What fine-tuning actually costs (it's not what you think)

Training an AI model is assumed to cost millions of dollars. It's the single most common misconception in the space, and it's wrong by roughly two orders of magnitude for the activity most people actually want to do. This post is a short, concrete breakdown of what fine-tuning actually costs in 2026, what it doesn't cost, and where the real spend lives. I'm writing it now because 'how much does this cost' is the first question I get whenever I mention that I'm training a model, and the answer

Apr 21, 2026·6 min

Own Your Tech

Why I chose Unsloth (before training a single token)

Honest note up front: I have not yet fine-tuned anything with Unsloth. I have not run a single training job. What I did is spend three weeks researching fine-tuning frameworks before writing a line of training code — and at the end of that research, I picked Unsloth and committed to it. This post is about why. I'm writing it now, before I start, for two reasons. First, so that if this decision ages badly I have to own it publicly. Second, so that whoever is doing this research next has a sta

Apr 20, 2026·7 min

Own Your Tech

Why I'm fine-tuning a small model (and why it runs on your laptop)

I'm training an AI model. It's going to run on a laptop. Three weeks ago I would have told you I was training a 70-billion-parameter model, the kind of thing that needs a data center to breathe. I'm not. I'm training a 4-billion-parameter model that runs on a Mac Mini. If the smaller one works, a larger companion model may follow. But the 4B is the bet. This is the first post in a series where I'll share what I'm building, why, how it's going, and what breaks along the way. The small-model

Apr 20, 2026·5 min

George's Takes

Why I'm Open-Sourcing My Portfolio

What active thesis investing actually looks like — and why I'll publish every bet I make.

Apr 20, 2026·4 min

George's Takes

Why I Sold My Index Funds in February

Why the index gospel was built for a world that no longer exists.

Apr 20, 2026·4 min

Investing

The Lie Every $997 Trading Course Sells You

What two years of quant trading taught me before I shut it down.

Apr 19, 2026·3 min

Free Tools

14 calculators and assessments. Runway, valuation, AI-proof score, and more.

Browse Tools

George's Takes

Free at the Base, Paid at the Frontier

Open source AI didn't die. It ran out of sponsors.

Apr 19, 2026·8 min

Own Your Tech

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 didn't think this was possible. Most people still don't. — George

Apr 16, 2026·6 min

Own Your Tech

Open Source AI Is Smaller Than You Think. I Did the Math.

The Week That Changed My Mind I spent last week inside open source AI. Reading repos. Testing bundles. Following the usual suspects - Open WebUI, Ollama, LM Studio, Jan, Goose. By Friday I was convinced every serious founder was self-hosting something. GitHub stars everywhere. New releases every week. The timeline on my feed was wall-to-wall "ditch ChatGPT, run it local, own your stack." Then I did the math. Here's what I actually found. Stars Lie. Forks Tell the Truth. GitHub stars are

Apr 15, 2026·5 min

Own Your Tech

Hardware Sovereignty Is the New Data Sovereignty

After I wrote about trying to buy a Mac Studio and failing, the replies kept circling the same question. "If I can't buy the hardware and I don't trust the cloud, what am I supposed to do?" That question led me somewhere I didn't expect. I Checked What GPUs You Can Actually Get in Canada Not the marketing pages. Not the pricing calculators either. The actual hardware you can spin up today in a Canadian data center. I went through every major cloud provider with Canadian infrastructure and

Apr 14, 2026·6 min

Own Your Tech

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 enough to run Llama 3 70B or Qwen 72B. Cheap enough to expense, not

Apr 14, 2026·5 min

George's Takes

One Company Summoned Two Central Banks

I was at my desk Tuesday when the Bloomberg alert came through. Bessent and Powell — the Treasury Secretary and the Fed Chair — had called an emergency meeting with every major bank CEO in America. Not about interest rates. Not about the war. Not about a bank run. About a single AI model. Built by a single company. "Yeah, Sovereignty, Sure" I run a project called Sovereign Cloud. The whole thesis is that governments and businesses need to own their own AI infrastructure — their data, thei

Apr 10, 2026·4 min

Showing 12 of 231 essays