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Own or Be Owned: The Week a Letter Switched Off Fable 5
On June 12 a government letter reached past Anthropic and switched off the best coding model I'd ever used. The shutdown wasn't the lesson - what it revealed about renting intelligence was.
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.
Closed Orchestrators Will Commoditize. Open Ones Will Compound.
Two AI infrastructure announcements landed in the same week. Ours was a model. We released flash-1-mini — a 4-billion-parameter bilingual Canadian legal AI — under Apache 2.0, alongside an open benchmark (CBLRE), an open training corpus, and the methodology behind both. The model runs on a MacBook. It runs on a Raspberry Pi. The weights are downloadable. You own the file. Perplexity's was an orchestrator. At Intel's Computex keynote in Taipei, CEO Aravind Srinivas demonstrated what the com
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What We're Building: An Open-Weight Canadian Model Series
The model is the smallest part of the story. Here's what it is, what it isn't, and what comes next. Today we shipped flash-1-mini. It's a 4-billion-parameter open-weight model, fine-tuned for Canadian context, bilingual in English and French, that runs on a laptop with no cloud dependency. You can download it, run it offline, and own it. The weights are yours. I want to write about what it is, what it isn't, and what comes after — because the model itself is the smallest part of the story.
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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 essayFrom the series · The AI Displacement Series
What I Did
This is Chapter 6 of 7 in the AI Displacement Series.
More on Announcements
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'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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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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You might not have read this
A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
What We're Building: An Open-Weight Canadian Model Series
The model is the smallest part of the story. Here's what it is, what it isn't, and what comes next. Today we shipped flash-1-mini. It's a 4-billion-parameter open-weight model, fine-tuned for Canadian context, bilingual in English and French, that runs on a laptop with no cloud dependency. You can download it, run it offline, and own it. The weights are yours. I want to write about what it is, what it isn't, and what comes after — because the model itself is the smallest part of the story.
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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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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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