Fit for Purpose

Selected work

Featured

Research Oct 2026

12,000 UFC Scorecards vs. Machine Learning And Human Judgement

How to evaluate a model when the ground truth is a panel of humans who disagree, and sometimes get it wrong. Twenty-five confident misses I trained a

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Essay Oct 2026

Evaluating A Viral AI Model: Build vs. Buy

A few weeks ago a new model called Jev launched, and within days it was being discussed across the industry, including inside our own organization. We spent the

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Research Aug 2026

What Building Machine Learning Models Has Taught Me About Product Discovery

A cautionary tale for any PM about to greenlight an AI feature: sometimes the simplest approach works better than the complicated model. I work as a product owner

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Research

Experiments & evaluations

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

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12,000 UFC Scorecards vs. Machine Learning And Human Judgement

How to evaluate a model when the ground truth is a panel of humans who disagree, and sometimes get it wrong. Twenty-five confident misses I trained a model to predict how professional UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) fight judges would score a fight from the round-by-round statistics. For

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

This is an engineering experiment, not a clinical validation study. ClinicalTrials.gov gives you age, sex, and condition as structured fields for every clinical trial, essentially for free. The eligibility criteria that decide whether a patient qualifies live in a free-text block: HbA1c thresholds, required medications, pregnancy exclusions, prior-

What Building Machine Learning Models Has Taught Me About Product Discovery

A cautionary tale for any PM about to greenlight an AI feature: sometimes the simplest approach works better than the complicated model. I work as a product owner for data science and AI products, where part of my job is figuring out which problems are worth solving with machine learning.

Essays

Architecture & product thinking

Working through the design choices around useful, deployable AI.

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Evaluating A Viral AI Model: Build vs. Buy

A few weeks ago a new model called Jev launched, and within days it was being discussed across the industry, including inside our own organization. We spent the next few weeks evaluating it. What started as a question about whether to adopt Jev turned into something different. I think Jev

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,

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

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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