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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 didn't think this was possible. Most people still don't. — George
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.
How 0% APR Credit Cards Actually Work — From the Other Side of the Desk
A few years ago I was working with a homeowner in Tennessee who needed $35,000 for a renovation project. He had one requirement: 0% APR. Wouldn't consider anything else. We found him a card with a 21-month intro period at 0%. Best terms on the market. He applied, got approved — for $20,000. Not $35,000. Twenty. Now he's got a $15,000 gap and no plan for it. But that wasn't even the real problem. The real problem was that the card had to ship. Physical card. In the mail. To Tennessee. He need
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I'm Starting to Write About Money
I'm starting to write about money. Not affiliate-stuffed credit card listicles dressed up as advice. Not "the one weird trick your bank doesn't want you to know." I mean how the system actually works from the inside. What I do with my own money. The math nobody shows you because it's boring and doesn't sell a course. This is the personal finance layer of Own or Be Owned — understanding the machinery well enough that it works for you instead of on you. The background I've spent the last
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We Swapped Our TTS Model. The Older, Free One Won.
When we launched Ghost Narrator, we used Fish Speech for voice cloning. It worked. The voice quality was past the threshold of "nobody notices." We were happy with it. Then we had a licensing problem. Fish Speech's license is restrictive for commercial use. We were publishing 200 narrated blog posts a month on a model we couldn't fully commercialize. That needed to change. So we tested alternatives. The obvious move was Mistral's new TTS model — newer, from a well-funded lab, getting attenti
Read essayFrom the series · 90-Day Action Plan to Surviving AI
The Untethering
"Who are you when the job goes away?"
More on Sovereign Compute
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
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
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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
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GPU Cloud Shopping in Canada: What's Actually Available
Availability and pricing in this post reflect what I found as of April 6, 2026. Cloud providers update their infrastructure regularly, and I hope some of this changes soon. If you find something different, I'd genuinely love to hear about it. I chose Canada. That might sound like a strange way to start a post about cloud computing, but it matters. I'm not Canadian by birth. I came here, built my life here, built my company here. This isn't a temporary arrangement for me. I'm committed to this
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You might not have read this
A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
The Hiding Test
I heard about this test from people who survived World War II. The question is simple. Would this person hide me in their home? Not retweet me. Not take a meeting. Not "hop on a quick call." Would they risk something real. It's an extreme question. Most of us will never face that version of it. But I think the underlying idea applies to everyone. And I think most people — especially founders, especially people who've spent ye
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Three Months of Killing Everything
I should probably feel behind. It's been three months since I killed the majority of my businesses. Three months of working 20 hours a week. I don't feel behind. I feel like I can see for the first time in years. The calendar My calendar went from six to eight meetings a day down to one. Sometimes zero. The meetings I do have aren't scheduled three weeks in advance — if I need to talk to my engineering team or my ops team, I just call them and we jump on. No calendar theater. No "let's fi
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Recent threads
The latest from @TheGeorgePu.
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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