Fit for Purpose

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Essay Sep 2026

Testing Zuckerberg's Infrastructure Argument

The claim On August 11, 2026, Mark Zuckerberg published a note arguing that the United States is losing the AI infrastructure race to China. His core evidence: "

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Research Sep 2026

From 36% to 79%: Testing LLMs for Clinical Trial Matching

Twenty-five patient-trial pairs went through this pipeline. Not one came back eligible. That includes the patient I built specifically to pass. The reason wasn't

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Research

Experiments & evaluations

Things I built, tested, measured, and learned from.

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From 36% to 79%: Testing LLMs for Clinical Trial Matching

Twenty-five patient-trial pairs went through this pipeline. Not one came back eligible. That includes the patient I built specifically to pass. The reason wasn't a bug. Every trial had at least one criterion the system couldn't resolve, usually something requiring investigator judgment. The pipeline

Essays

Architecture & product thinking

Working through the design choices around useful, deployable AI.

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The Word "Hallucination" Is Doing Too Much Work

I spent the first stretch of my career in bioengineering, then in quality engineering on FDA-regulated medical devices. In that world, "biologically inspired" is not a finished thought, but more so the start of one. Before a biological analogy can justify anything about how a device works,

Testing Zuckerberg's Infrastructure Argument

The claim On August 11, 2026, Mark Zuckerberg published a note arguing that the United States is losing the AI infrastructure race to China. His core evidence: "Countries like China are bringing online 1GW+ of nuclear capacity every other week, so we will need to accelerate building both energy

Architecting an Agent Around a Data Moat

The company below, Meridian, is a composite. It isn't a real business, and nothing here describes an actual client engagement. Meridian is a B2B marketplace that connects buyers and suppliers across a fragmented industrial category. Its product is fine. Its moat isn't the product. It'

About Tanner

AI product, data science, and the space between them.

I work across AI product and data science, with a background in bioengineering and building products in regulated industries. Fit for Purpose is where I test ideas, document what works, and write through the tradeoffs.

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