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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.
Read storyFounder Reality is written by George Pu — $10M+ portfolio built by 27, no investors, no co-founders.
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What I'm thinking about right now.
Closed Orchestrators Will Commoditize. Open Ones Will Compound.
Two AI infrastructure announcements landed in the same week. Ours was a model. We released flash-1-mini — a 4-billion-parameter bilingual Canadian legal AI — under Apache 2.0, alongside an open benchmark (CBLRE), an open training corpus, and the methodology behind both. The model runs on a MacBook. It runs on a Raspberry Pi. The weights are downloadable. You own the file. Perplexity's was an orchestrator. At Intel's Computex keynote in Taipei, CEO Aravind Srinivas demonstrated what the com
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What We're Building: An Open-Weight Canadian Model Series
The model is the smallest part of the story. Here's what it is, what it isn't, and what comes next. Today we shipped flash-1-mini. It's a 4-billion-parameter open-weight model, fine-tuned for Canadian context, bilingual in English and French, that runs on a laptop with no cloud dependency. You can download it, run it offline, and own it. The weights are yours. I want to write about what it is, what it isn't, and what comes after — because the model itself is the smallest part of the story.
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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 essayFrom the series · The AI Displacement Series
What I Did
This is Chapter 6 of 7 in the AI Displacement Series.
More on Own Your Tech
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
Closed Orchestrators Will Commoditize. Open Ones Will Compound.
Two AI infrastructure announcements landed in the same week. Ours was a model. We released flash-1-mini — a 4-billion-parameter bilingual Canadian legal AI — under Apache 2.0, alongside an open benchmark (CBLRE), an open training corpus, and the methodology behind both. The model runs on a MacBook. It runs on a Raspberry Pi. The weights are downloadable. You own the file. Perplexity's was an orchestrator. At Intel's Computex keynote in Taipei, CEO Aravind Srinivas demonstrated what the com
Read essaySovereignty 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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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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You might not have read this
A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
How 0% APR Credit Cards Actually Work — From the Other Side of the Desk
A few years ago I was working with a homeowner in Tennessee who needed $35,000 for a renovation project. He had one requirement: 0% APR. Wouldn't consider anything else. We found him a card with a 21-month intro period at 0%. Best terms on the market. He applied, got approved — for $20,000. Not $35,000. Twenty. Now he's got a $15,000 gap and no plan for it. But that wasn't even the real problem. The real problem was that the ca
Read this essayWhat We're Building: An Open-Weight Canadian Model Series
The model is the smallest part of the story. Here's what it is, what it isn't, and what comes next. Today we shipped flash-1-mini. It's a 4-billion-parameter open-weight model, fine-tuned for Canadian context, bilingual in English and French, that runs on a laptop with no cloud dependency. You can download it, run it offline, and own it. The weights are yours. I want to write about what it is, what it isn't, and what comes after — because the model itself is the smallest part of the story.
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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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