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While You Were Watching the Chatbots
Over the past two years, Canada quietly rebuilt the question of who controls its artificial intelligence. Not in one announcement. That's the point. There was never a single moment loud enough to make you look up. The decisions arrived in fragments — a Christmas Eve letter, a contribution agreement with a file number, a press release at a university most people don't follow, an MOU with the important parts blacked out. Each fragment was, on its own, small enough to ignore. Together they red
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.
Fine-tuning your own AI doesn't cost $35,000. It cost us about $50.
Two A100 graphics cards. Spinning quietly in a Google datacenter. Five hours of training. About $50 in compute. That's what it cost us to fine-tune our own 4-billion-parameter AI model this week. The base model went from 30% accuracy on the tasks we care about to 98%. Read any article on fine-tuning costs and you'll see numbers between $5,000 and $35,000. One blog called it a 'CFO conversation.' Another listed 'hidden expenses' that could double your initial estimate. A third quoted team
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Your ChatGPT and Claude Conversations Are Court Evidence
Greg Brockman's journal became Exhibit 161 this week. The next chapter writes itself. Someone's ChatGPT history becomes Exhibit 162. That sentence sounds like speculation. It isn't. The infrastructure is already in place. The court orders are already in place. The only thing missing is a famous enough defendant for the headline to break the way Brockman's did. The court order most people haven't read In May 2025, Magistr
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The Journal That Exposed the President
Greg Brockman keeps a diary. Not a metaphor. A literal, decades-long, type-into-his-laptop journal that he started in college when he was deciding what to study. He kept it through Stripe. He kept it through founding OpenAI with Musk and Altman. He kept it through the brawl for control of the company in 2017 - the fight that's now being relitigated in a San Francisco courtroom. This week, his journal became Exhibit 161. Hun
Read essayFrom the series · 90-Day Action Plan to Surviving AI
The Inventory
When I was figuring out what to do after SimpleDirect, I made a list of everything I had.
More on Announcements
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
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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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
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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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What you might have missed
Three things from across the site you may not have found yet.
You might not have read this
A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
How I'm Building Multi-Cloud (Before Spending a Dollar)
This is a follow-up to my last post about cloud lock-in. That piece was about the philosophy — why we don't go deep on any single provider's managed services. This one is about what happens next. You've decided you don't want to be locked in. Great. Now what? I'll be honest — I expected this part to be straightforward. Pick a few providers, compare prices, split the workload. Done. It wasn't like that at all. Some Context I
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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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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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