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AI Real Estate: From Apartment to Mansion
AI Real Estate: From Apartment to Mansion A $3,999 Mac Studio runs a 122 billion parameter AI model on your desk. Running the same model on AWS costs roughly $5 an hour. About $3,700 a month if you leave it on. The Mac pays for itself in five weeks. A $3,999 Mac Studio runs a 122B parameter AI model locally. Running that same model on AWS: $5/hour. ~$3,700/month if you leave it on. The Mac pays for itself in five weeks. I didn't think this was possible. Most people still don't. — George
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.
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 card had to ship. Physical card. In the mail. To Tennessee. He need
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I'm Starting to Write About Money
I'm starting to write about money. Not affiliate-stuffed credit card listicles dressed up as advice. Not "the one weird trick your bank doesn't want you to know." I mean how the system actually works from the inside. What I do with my own money. The math nobody shows you because it's boring and doesn't sell a course. This is the personal finance layer of Own or Be Owned — understanding the machinery well enough that it works for you instead of on you. The background I've spent the last
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We Swapped Our TTS Model. The Older, Free One Won.
When we launched Ghost Narrator, we used Fish Speech for voice cloning. It worked. The voice quality was past the threshold of "nobody notices." We were happy with it. Then we had a licensing problem. Fish Speech's license is restrictive for commercial use. We were publishing 200 narrated blog posts a month on a model we couldn't fully commercialize. That needed to change. So we tested alternatives. The obvious move was Mistral's new TTS model — newer, from a well-funded lab, getting attenti
Read essayFrom the series · The AI Displacement Series
The Two Responses
This is Chapter 2 of 7 in the AI Displacement Series.
More on Policy & Economy
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
Hardware Sovereignty Is the New Data Sovereignty
After I wrote about trying to buy a Mac Studio and failing, the replies kept circling the same question. "If I can't buy the hardware and I don't trust the cloud, what am I supposed to do?" That question led me somewhere I didn't expect. I Checked What GPUs You Can Actually Get in Canada Not the marketing pages. Not the pricing calculators either. The actual hardware you can spin up today in a Canadian data center. I went through every major cloud provider with Canadian infrastructure and
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The Provincial Download
Everyone is talking about Canada cutting immigration. Nobody is talking about Canada changing who runs it. That's the actual story. And it's a bigger deal than the cuts. How I See This I need to tell you where I'm coming from. Because it shapes everything. I moved to Canada from China when I was 18. Showed up at the University of Waterloo with a suitcase and no plan beyond getting a degree and figuring it out. I went throug
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The Umbrella Closed on a Monday
The Umbrella Closed on a Monday I tweeted something Monday morning about France and nuclear weapons. Felt strange typing it. I help founders figure out where to build their lives. I'm not a foreign policy guy. I don't have a PhD in international relations. I'm a 27-year-old in Toronto who runs a small business and posts on the internet. But I've been saying for two years that the world is about to test who actually owns their
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The Meta-Skill
A reader asked me: "What skill should I learn right now?" I used to have an answer for this. Pick something that compounds. Learn to code. Learn to sell. Get good at writing. Find your niche and go deep. I don't say that anymore. The Half-Life Problem Every skill is getting compressed by AI faster than you can master it. Coding? Claude writes better code than most junior engineers. And it improves every quarter. Writing? AI
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I Almost Paid $4,000 a Year to Rent My Own Voice
I almost paid $4,000 a year to rent my own voice back to me. ElevenLabs. $330/month. The model that powers it? Open weights. The inference? Runs on 3GB of RAM. The voice cloning? A 30-second sample and a model you can download for free. The only thing between you and the exact same output is a setup guide nobody bothered to write. So I wrote one. Then I open-sourced it. The gap The gap between what AI costs to run and wha
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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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