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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
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.
One Rack Is a Cloud
What colocation is, and why most AI founders have never heard of it
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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
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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
Read essayFrom the series · The AI Displacement Series
What I Did
This is Chapter 6 of 7 in the AI Displacement Series.
More on Decision Log
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
We're Shutting Down Our Cloud-Hosted Apps
Effective immediately, we're sunsetting the cloud-hosted versions of the following apps: * Founder Simulation Game * SimpleDirect Changelog * SimpleDirect Chat * SimpleDirect Roadmap SimpleDirect Financing, our legacy fintech application, is not affected. Let's be real These apps have no moat. We know that. AI can rebuild any of them in an afternoon. Pretending otherwise - keeping servers running, maintaining hosted vers
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I Almost Paid $4,000 a Year to Rent My Own Voice
I almost paid $4,000 a year to rent my own voice back to me. ElevenLabs. $330/month. The model that powers it? Open weights. The inference? Runs on 3GB of RAM. The voice cloning? A 30-second sample and a model you can download for free. The only thing between you and the exact same output is a setup guide nobody bothered to write. So I wrote one. Then I open-sourced it. The gap The gap between what AI costs to run and wha
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What You Kill > What You Build
OpenAI killed Sora Not sunsetted. Killed. The product they hyped as the next ChatGPT. The one Disney was about to invest a billion dollars around. The one that was supposed to turn OpenAI into the creative engine of the AI era. Gone in an afternoon. The reason is almost boring in how obvious it is. Sora was eating compute - the most expensive resource on earth right now - while Anthropic was running away with the market tha
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For Governments
The case I'm making to policymakers about AI displacement and what to do.
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ReadOwn or Be Owned
In the AI economy, you're on one side of the split. This is how to find out which.
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A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
Constant Change Is Not New
"We are living through the most significant technological change in human history." I've heard this sentence a thousand times in the last two years. And the thing is — it might be true. But it also might not matter the way you think it does. Because people have said this before. Many times. And they were right every time. This has all happened before In the 1890s, doctors literally diagnosed something called neurasthenia — ne
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You Cannot Buy What Can Only Be Built
Meta spent $14.3 billion last year to buy half of a data labeling company. They made its 28-year-old CEO the head of their Superintelligence Lab. Gave him a title that didn't exist six months before. Put him above researchers who'd been doing AI before he was in high school. Nine months later, his team reports to other people. A new group controls the data pipelines. The researchers he was supposed to lead are leaving. And the
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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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