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The Barrier to Building AI Isn't Talent. It's Capital.
Startups in San Francisco raise $18 million just to afford the compute. We did the same work bootstrapped. The real gate on who gets to build AI isn't ability - it's who can afford to be in the room.
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.
We Are No Longer Building a Canadian Legal AI Model
Yesterday I published the post-mortem: we asked flash-1-mini ten questions any Canadian lawyer would consider basic, and it invented seven citations. That post was about what broke. This one is about what it changed. Because two weeks ago I was telling people we were building a Canadian legal AI model - and today we decided we're not. I want to walk through why, because the answer changed how I think about what "building AI" actually means. The original scope The original scope made sense
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We Asked Our 4B Legal AI 10 Questions. It Invented 7 Cases.
An honest post-mortem on our own model — and what anyone building or buying AI should take from it.
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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 essayFrom the series · The AI Displacement Series
What's Actually Happening
This is Chapter 1 of 7 in the AI Displacement Series. Every chapter is free.
More on Investing
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
Why I'm Open-Sourcing My Portfolio
What active thesis investing actually looks like — and why I'll publish every bet I make.
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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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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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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.
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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Why CBLRE Matters More Than the Model
Yesterday we released CBLRE — the Canadian Bilingual Legal and Regulatory Evaluation. The day before, we released flash-1-mini, a 4-billion-parameter bilingual Canadian legal AI model. Most of the launch coverage has focused on the model. That's the wrong artifact to focus on. The model is the proof. CBLRE is the moat. Here's why. The gap nobody had filled Before yesterday, no standard public benchmark existed for Canadian bilingual legal AI evaluation. That sentence is bigger than it so
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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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