243+ 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?

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

May 23, 2026·5 min

Own Your Tech

Canada Is Renting Its Sovereignty

In the last piece I wrote about the anchor: Canada designated Cohere as its national champion at the foundation model layer — $240 million, a 24-year term, an MOU that called the company "the only sovereign, cloud-agnostic large language model operating in Canada," and a fund Cohere itself proposed. That designation is settled for a generation. This piece is the opposite kind of writing. The last one was analysis of public records, and I tried to stay out of it. This one carries a point of

May 23, 2026·8 min

Policy & Economy

How Cohere Wrote the Fund That's Now Funding Everyone Else

On Christmas Eve 2024, the Government of Canada issued a Letter of Intent to Cohere for a Strategic Innovation Fund contribution of $240 million. The timing is the first thing worth noticing. Christmas Eve is when governments send letters they want done quickly and quietly. The Trudeau government was already wobbling. Chrystia Freeland had resigned on December 16, eight days earlier, in a public letter that called out the Prime Minister's "costly political gimmicks." Less than two weeks lat

May 23, 2026·8 min

Own Your Tech

Sovereignty Is Not About Ownership

A vice-president at a Canadian university called me last month. Her president had told her the institution needed to be on sovereign AI within the year. The provincial government had announced a funding program. Other universities were already applying. She wanted to know what she should be evaluating. I asked her what sovereign meant in this context. She paused for a long time. Then she said, "I think it means the data stays in Canada." I asked what about it staying in Canada specifically

May 14, 2026·6 min

Own Your Tech

I Almost Told a Lawyer to Build His Own AI

A lawyer friend — call him Mark — called me this week. He and another friend had spent the weekend trying to run an 8 billion parameter language model on a 16 gigabyte laptop. Mark thought he was going to show his friend something impressive. The output was gibberish. Incoherent strings of text that no junior associate would have signed off on. He'd come to me because he wanted to know what hardware to buy next. On the call, I didn't know. What I did know was NVIDIA's software stack. I'd

May 14, 2026·6 min

Own Your Tech

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

May 12, 2026·5 min

Free Tools

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

Browse Tools

George's Takes

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

May 9, 2026·6 min

George's Takes

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

May 9, 2026·4 min

Own Your Tech

One Rack Is a Cloud

What colocation is, and why most AI founders have never heard of it

Apr 28, 2026·10 min

Own Your Tech

You Want Out of OpenAI. Here's Where to Actually Start.

A week ago, I published AI Real Estate. The framing was simple: the AI you use today is rented — like an apartment. There's a ladder above it. Most people don't know the ladder exists. The response was the part I didn't expect. Dozens of people messaged me with versions of the same question. I read it. I get it. I want out. Where do I actually start? Some were lawyers. Some were founders. Some were accountants and consultant

Apr 27, 2026·16 min

Own Your Tech

Three Kinds of Cloud (and Why Two of Them Keep Getting Confused)

I sat down with a Canadian university last week. They were trying to articulate to industry partners what their compute offering would be. They knew "sovereign" was the right word. They couldn't define it for a buyer. They couldn't tell me what a partner would actually use it for that they couldn't already do on AWS in Montreal. That's not the university's failure. The industry calls three different things "cloud" and lets two

Apr 27, 2026·6 min

Own Your Tech

GPU Cloud Shopping in Canada: Three Weeks Later

Three weeks ago I wrote a post called GPU Cloud Shopping in Canada: What's Actually Available. The short version: I checked every major cloud provider with a Canadian data center, trying to rent a current-generation GPU to train AI models in this country. Google Cloud Montreal had chips from 2017. AWS listed the right hardware but wouldn't let me actually run it. OVHcloud's H100s turned out to be in France, not Quebec. DigitalOc

Apr 24, 2026·6 min

Showing 12 of 243 essays