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One Rack Is a Cloud
What colocation is, and why most AI founders have never heard of it
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.
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 public
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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,
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Why I'm Open-Sourcing My Portfolio
What active thesis investing actually looks like — and why I'll publish every bet I make.
Read essayFrom the series · 90-Day Action Plan to Surviving AI
The Conversation
The conversation that changed everything for me was 15 minutes.
More on Own Your Tech
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
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
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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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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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You might not have read this
A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
When to Build vs Buy in AI (My Edition)
I've gotten this wrong before. Not in a small, low-stakes, "oops we picked the wrong software" kind of way. In a way that cost me a year of my life, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and nearly killed a business. So when I tell you the build vs buy question in AI is the most important decision a founder can make right now, I'm not being dramatic. I'm speaking from the scar tissue. The Year I Built What I Should Have Bought
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A 5-Mile Island Is Holding Your Portfolio Hostage
The S&P 500 is down 9%. The NASDAQ just entered correction territory. Oil hit $116 a barrel - up over 50% in a single month, the fastest surge since Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. And the entire thing hinges on a 5-mile island and a 21-mile strait that most people couldn't find on a map 60 days ago. The Island and the Strait Kharg Island is a piece of coral off the coast of Iran. It's roughly a third the size of Manhattan. 9
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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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