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What It Actually Takes to Get a GPU in Canada
We had the money and we're a multi-year cloud customer. It still took two months, a flood of scammers, and a $14,000-a-week quote to rent a few chips. Here's how GPU access actually works.
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 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.
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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
Read essayFrom the series · The AI Displacement Series
The Math of Ownership
This is Chapter 5 of 7 in the AI Displacement Series.
More on Inside the Machine
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
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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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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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.
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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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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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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