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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
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.
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
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GPU Cloud Shopping in Canada: Three Weeks Later
Three weeks ago I wrote a post called GPU Cloud Shopping in Canada: What's Actually Available. The short version: I checked every major cloud provider with a Canadian data center, trying to rent a current-generation GPU to train AI models in this country. Google Cloud Montreal had chips from 2017. AWS listed the right hardware but wouldn't let me actually run it. OVHcloud's H100s turned out to be in France, not Quebec. DigitalOc
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What fine-tuning actually costs (it's not what you think)
Training an AI model is assumed to cost millions of dollars. It's the single most common misconception in the space, and it's wrong by roughly two orders of magnitude for the activity most people actually want to do. This post is a short, concrete breakdown of what fine-tuning actually costs in 2026, what it doesn't cost, and where the real spend lives. I'm writing it now because 'how much does this cost' is the first question
Read essayFrom the series · 90-Day Action Plan to Surviving AI
Day 90: Graduation
90 days ago, you started with an article and a question.
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What fine-tuning actually costs (it's not what you think)
Training an AI model is assumed to cost millions of dollars. It's the single most common misconception in the space, and it's wrong by roughly two orders of magnitude for the activity most people actually want to do. This post is a short, concrete breakdown of what fine-tuning actually costs in 2026, what it doesn't cost, and where the real spend lives. I'm writing it now because 'how much does this cost' is the first question
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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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