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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 Commitment
After I started running experiments and having conversations, opportunities started appearing.
More on Policy & Economy
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
Anyone Can Copy the Methodology. Only One Lab Can Keep the Promise.
Vinci ships August 8 with the methodology published in full - so competitors can copy it. The thing they can't copy is whether the model actually does what its constitution says, in public, under tests anyone can run.
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Own or Be Owned: The Week a Letter Switched Off Fable 5
On June 12 a government letter reached past Anthropic and switched off the best coding model I'd ever used. The shutdown wasn't the lesson - what it revealed about renting intelligence was.
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Sovereignty Is Not About Ownership
A vice-president at a Canadian university called me last month. Her president had told her the institution needed to be on sovereign AI within the year. The provincial government had announced a funding program. Other universities were already applying. She wanted to know what she should be evaluating. I asked her what sovereign meant in this context. She paused for a long time. Then she said, "I think it means the data stays in Canada." I asked what about it staying in Canada specifically
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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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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
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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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