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

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Founder Reality is written by George Pu — $10M+ portfolio built by 27, no investors, no co-founders.

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I'm Starting to Write About Money
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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.
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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

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When to Build vs Buy in AI (My Edition)

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 I was running a B2B fintech product. SaaS pricing. Paying customer

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From the series · The AI Displacement Series

What Gets Displaced

This is Chapter 3 of 7 in the AI Displacement Series.

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Three essays from the archive on a different angle.

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