From the lab
Writing on AI ownership
Published on Founder Reality. We don't host the essays here — we link to them. One blog, one source, no duplicate canonicals.
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...
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...
I Almost Told a Lawyer to Build His Own AI
A lawyer friend — call him Mark — called me this week. He and another friend had spent the weekend trying to run an 8 billion parameter language model on a 16 gigabyte laptop. Ma...
Fine-tuning your own AI doesn't cost $35,000. It cost us about $50.
Two A100 graphics cards. Spinning quietly in a Google datacenter. Five hours of training. About $50 in compute. That's what it cost us to fine-tune our own 4-billion-parameter A...
Your ChatGPT and Claude Conversations Are Court Evidence
Greg Brockman's journal became Exhibit 161 this week. The next chapter writes itself. Someone's ChatGPT history becomes Exhibit 162. That sentence sounds like speculation. It i...
One Rack Is a Cloud
What colocation is, and why most AI founders have never heard of it
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 ex...
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...