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Open Weights, Closed System
Google shipped local AI on the Mac this week. The weights are Apache 2.0. The experience is a walled garden. That's not a contradiction. That's the playbook.
Read storyFounder Reality is written by George Pu — $10M+ portfolio built by 27, no investors, no co-founders.
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What I'm thinking about right now.
Canada Is Renting Its Sovereignty
In the last piece I wrote about the anchor: Canada designated Cohere as its national champion at the foundation model layer — $240 million, a 24-year term, an MOU that called the company "the only sovereign, cloud-agnostic large language model operating in Canada," and a fund Cohere itself proposed. That designation is settled for a generation. This piece is the opposite kind of writing. The last one was analysis of public records, and I tried to stay out of it. This one carries a point of
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How Cohere Wrote the Fund That's Now Funding Everyone Else
On Christmas Eve 2024, the Government of Canada issued a Letter of Intent to Cohere for a Strategic Innovation Fund contribution of $240 million. The timing is the first thing worth noticing. Christmas Eve is when governments send letters they want done quickly and quietly. The Trudeau government was already wobbling. Chrystia Freeland had resigned on December 16, eight days earlier, in a public letter that called out the Prime Minister's "costly political gimmicks." Less than two weeks lat
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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 essayFrom the series · 90-Day Action Plan to Surviving AI
The Conversation
The conversation that changed everything for me was 15 minutes.
More on Inside the Machine
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
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 ca
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The Lie Every $997 Trading Course Sells You
What two years of quant trading taught me before I shut it down.
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Why I Sold My Index Funds in February
Why the index gospel was built for a world that no longer exists.
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One Company Summoned Two Central Banks
I was at my desk Tuesday when the Bloomberg alert came through. Bessent and Powell — the Treasury Secretary and the Fed Chair — had called an emergency meeting with every major bank CEO in America. Not about interest rates. Not about the war. Not about a bank run. About a single AI model. Built by a single company. "Yeah, Sovereignty, Sure" I run a project called Sovereign Cloud. The whole thesis is that governments and bus
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AWS and Google Cloud Are Designed to Keep You. Here's What We Do Instead.
When my startup was brand new, both AWS and Google Cloud felt like gifts. Our incubator had relationships with both. The credits were generous. The onboarding was smooth. We didn't pay a dollar out of pocket for months. It felt like they were investing in us. They weren't. They were investing in our dependency. I didn't understand that then. I do now. What You're Actually Paying For I want you to try something. Strip away
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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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