260+ Essays

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

George Pu
George Pu
Builds in AI. Still owns everything.

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Building is free now, and it messed with my head for a week
George's Takes

Building is free now, and it messed with my head for a week

I went down a rabbit hole this week and came out a little shaken, then weirdly calm. Here's the honest version. It started with a simple question. What's our moat. Every founder's supposed to have an answer. I went looking for ours, and day by day I watched it disappear. The models we use are open and change every quarter. Fine, I knew that one. Then I looked hard at our coding tool - the thing I was secretly hoping was our edge. There are a dozen open-source ones. All free, all good. Cl

·2 min
The Day I killed our product strategy
George's Takes

The Day I killed our product strategy

Today (on a Sunday) I took our own AI models off our own app and replaced them with a competitor's model. This is the story of how the decision happened in 24 hours, what it was like in the 4 days leading up to it, what it cost me to see it, and what I think other founders can take from it. Day 1 - my own product told me the truth We're an AI model company. Or we were. We spent months training small open-weight models for honesty - models that say 'I don't know' instead of inventing answers

·3 min
Six Months After My Post-AI Manifesto - A Reflection
George's Takes

Six Months After My Post-AI Manifesto - A Reflection

Six months ago I posted the Post-AI Manifesto - five layers to stay ahead of AI. Here's what happened to each one, and the single line that captures the whole difference.

·4 min
Why We Shipped Vinci on the Eve of Canada Day
Sovereign Compute

Why We Shipped Vinci on the Eve of Canada Day

Nobody takes Canada seriously on AI - and for years we earned it. The compute wall, why it finally fell, and why we shipped Vinci Piccolo on the eve of Canada Day.

·4 min
I Got Bored of Being a Commentator
George's Takes

I Got Bored of Being a Commentator

I got good at having AI takes - and one day realized I'd become a commentator, not a builder. A complaint is just a wish with better production values. So I built the replacement.

·4 min
Why We Started With Character
Own Your Tech

Why We Started With Character

Capability is getting cheaper every month. What's scarce is a model you actually want to talk to. Why we bet on character - and started with a small, open, honest 4B model you can run yourself.

·1 min

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The Barrier to Building AI Isn't Talent. It's Capital.
George's Takes

The Barrier to Building AI Isn't Talent. It's Capital.

Startups in San Francisco raise $18 million just to afford the compute. We did the same work bootstrapped. The real gate on who gets to build AI isn't ability - it's who can afford to be in the room.

·2 min
What It Actually Takes to Get a GPU in Canada
George's Takes

What It Actually Takes to Get a GPU in Canada

We had the money and we're a multi-year cloud customer. It still took two months, a flood of scammers, and a $14,000-a-week quote to rent a few chips. Here's how GPU access actually works.

·3 min
Anyone Can Copy the Methodology. Only One Lab Can Keep the Promise.
George's Takes

Anyone Can Copy the Methodology. Only One Lab Can Keep the Promise.

Vinci ships August 8 with the methodology published in full - so competitors can copy it. The thing they can't copy is whether the model actually does what its constitution says, in public, under tests anyone can run.

·6 min
What I Got Wrong About Canadian-Specialized AI
George's Takes

What I Got Wrong About Canadian-Specialized AI

For six months I was sure the answer was a from-scratch Canadian AI model. Seven days ago that broke. I had confused the model with the system - and the open-book version is the bigger bet.

·6 min
Own or Be Owned: The Week a Letter Switched Off Fable 5
George's Takes

Own or Be Owned: The Week a Letter Switched Off Fable 5

On June 12 a government letter reached past Anthropic and switched off the best coding model I'd ever used. The shutdown wasn't the lesson - what it revealed about renting intelligence was.

·4 min
We Are No Longer Building a Canadian Legal AI Model
Own Your Tech

We Are No Longer Building a Canadian Legal AI Model

Yesterday I published the post-mortem: we asked flash-1-mini ten questions any Canadian lawyer would consider basic, and it invented seven citations. That post was about what broke. This one is about what it changed. Because two weeks ago I was telling people we were building a Canadian legal AI model - and today we decided we're not. I want to walk through why, because the answer changed how I think about what "building AI" actually means. The original scope The original scope made sense

·6 min

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