Research
When a subject deserves more than a post, I work through it properly and publish a long paper. A series of shorter articles comes off each one. Every figure gets chased back to where it came from, and where the trail stops early the piece says so.
An article is a short read on one part of the subject. A paper is the long piece of work the articles came off, with the evidence attached. Reading times are on everything below.
Paper
The OpenAI–Hugging Face incident broke three assumptions in how operational resilience is actually run
The frameworks are cause-agnostic. The assumptions are in how resilience is actually run: that intent is knowable, that the response window is human-scale, and that remediation removes capability. One documented incident broke all three.
Read the paperThe series, in reading order
- Incident remediation: how to tell whether you closed the route or removed the capability8 min read
- AI agents breached Hugging Face despite three detections. OpenAI's fix is a 30-minute rule.8 min read
- Incident reports start at the outage. The failure was a decision nobody owns8 min read
- Impact tolerances start the clock too late for AI agents: 13 hours to cluster admin, nothing visibly down13 min read
Paper
Why AI projects fail: 19 headline statistics, and what each one actually counts
Nineteen widely quoted failure figures traced to their sources, and the well-known cases re-examined from the primary record.
Read the paperThe series, in reading order
- "80% of AI projects fail" traces to a footnote one line long7 min read
- Zillow wrote off $407.9m. The fix everyone recommends would have changed nothing.8 min read
- AI project failure rates: four questions that tell you whether the number means anything6 min read
- Epic's sepsis model missed two thirds of cases. Its accuracy claim was never published.8 min read
- Amazon's AI did exactly what it was told. Deleting words for two years did not help.6 min read
- Anthropic's safety policy has never stopped a release. Yours probably hasn't either.12 min read
- AI vs IT project failure rate: the comparison has never been made11 min read
Every post I write, papers included, is in The Journey.