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You Want Out of OpenAI. Here's Where to Actually Start.
A week ago, I published AI Real Estate. The framing was simple: the AI you use today is rented — like an apartment. There's a ladder above it. Most people don't know the ladder exists. The response was the part I didn't expect. Dozens of people messaged me with versions of the same question. I read it. I get it. I want out. Where do I actually start? Some were lawyers. Some were founders. Some were accountants and consultants and clinic owners. None of them knew what a GPU was. Most didn
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.
Why I'm fine-tuning a small model (and why it runs on your laptop)
I'm training an AI model. It's going to run on a laptop. Three weeks ago I would have told you I was training a 70-billion-parameter model, the kind of thing that needs a data center to breathe. I'm not. I'm training a 4-billion-parameter model that runs on a Mac Mini. If the smaller one works, a larger companion model may follow. But the 4B is the bet. This is the first post in a series where I'll share what I'm building, why,
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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.
Read essayFrom the series · The AI Displacement Series
What's Actually Happening
This is Chapter 1 of 7 in the AI Displacement Series. Every chapter is free.
More on Policy & Economy
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
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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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 t
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One Company Summoned Two Central Banks
I was at my desk Tuesday when the Bloomberg alert came through. Bessent and Powell — the Treasury Secretary and the Fed Chair — had called an emergency meeting with every major bank CEO in America. Not about interest rates. Not about the war. Not about a bank run. About a single AI model. Built by a single company. "Yeah, Sovereignty, Sure" I run a project called Sovereign Cloud. The whole thesis is that governments and bus
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What you might have missed
Three things from across the site you may not have found yet.
You might not have read this
A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
Free at the Base, Paid at the Frontier
Open source AI didn't die. It ran out of sponsors.
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When to Build vs Buy in AI (My Edition)
I've gotten this wrong before. Not in a small, low-stakes, "oops we picked the wrong software" kind of way. In a way that cost me a year of my life, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and nearly killed a business. So when I tell you the build vs buy question in AI is the most important decision a founder can make right now, I'm not being dramatic. I'm speaking from the scar tissue. The Year I Built What I Should Have Bought
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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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