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.
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 brok...
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.
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.
Why CBLRE Matters More Than the Model
Yesterday we released CBLRE — the Canadian Bilingual Legal and Regulatory Evaluation. The day before, we released flash-1-mini, a 4-billion-parameter bilingual Canadian legal AI m...
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, alo...
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...