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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 · 90-Day Action Plan to Surviving AI
The Resistance
Even after I saw the numbers — 70% of my work exposed — I didn't act for 3 months.
More on Sovereign Compute
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
What I Got Wrong About Canadian-Specialized AI
For six months I was sure the answer was a from-scratch Canadian AI model. Seven days ago that broke. I had confused the model with the system - and the open-book version is the bigger bet.
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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.
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Open Source AI Is Smaller Than You Think. I Did the Math.
The Week That Changed My Mind I spent last week inside open source AI. Reading repos. Testing bundles. Following the usual suspects - Open WebUI, Ollama, LM Studio, Jan, Goose. By Friday I was convinced every serious founder was self-hosting something. GitHub stars everywhere. New releases every week. The timeline on my feed was wall-to-wall "ditch ChatGPT, run it local, own your stack." Then I did the math. Here's what I a
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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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Canada Is Renting Its Sovereignty
In the last piece I wrote about the anchor: Canada designated Cohere as its national champion at the foundation model layer — $240 million, a 24-year term, an MOU that called the company "the only sovereign, cloud-agnostic large language model operating in Canada," and a fund Cohere itself proposed. That designation is settled for a generation. This piece is the opposite kind of writing. The last one was analysis of public records, and I tried to stay out of it. This one carries a point of
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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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