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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 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.
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
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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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The Journal That Exposed the President
Greg Brockman keeps a diary. Not a metaphor. A literal, decades-long, type-into-his-laptop journal that he started in college when he was deciding what to study. He kept it through Stripe. He kept it through founding OpenAI with Musk and Altman. He kept it through the brawl for control of the company in 2017 - the fight that's now being relitigated in a San Francisco courtroom. This week, his journal became Exhibit 161. Hun
Read essayFrom the series · 90-Day Action Plan to Surviving AI
The Wake-Up
The article that did it for me wasn't even about home improvement or fintech. It was about how AI was automating customer onboarding and financing workflows faster and cheaper than any SaaS platform.
More on Inside the Machine
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.
Own Your Tech
Why renting your stack is the quietest way to lose everything you build.
ReadThe Post-AI Manifesto
The five layers AI can't eat — and how to build a career inside them.
ReadOwn or Be Owned
In the AI economy, you're on one side of the split. This is how to find out which.
ReadYou might not have read this
A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
A 5-Mile Island Is Holding Your Portfolio Hostage
The S&P 500 is down 9%. The NASDAQ just entered correction territory. Oil hit $116 a barrel - up over 50% in a single month, the fastest surge since Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. And the entire thing hinges on a 5-mile island and a 21-mile strait that most people couldn't find on a map 60 days ago. The Island and the Strait Kharg Island is a piece of coral off the coast of Iran. It's roughly a third the size of Manhattan. 9
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What You Kill > What You Build
OpenAI killed Sora Not sunsetted. Killed. The product they hyped as the next ChatGPT. The one Disney was about to invest a billion dollars around. The one that was supposed to turn OpenAI into the creative engine of the AI era. Gone in an afternoon. The reason is almost boring in how obvious it is. Sora was eating compute - the most expensive resource on earth right now - while Anthropic was running away with the market tha
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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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