Writing on AI, data science, actuarial science, and the ideas that keep me up at night.
AI labs are surrounding their models with proprietary tooling — subscriptions, IDEs, agents. The bet is that you'll never leave. Here's why staying model-agnostic is the safer play.
I threw a raw astrophotography FITS file at VerbaGPT and asked it to process the Orion nebula. It applied color stretching and star-masking in 15 minutes. Code + LLM is unreasonably effective.
AI makes it trivial to build software for narrow problems. The result is a tool zoo that demands more attention than it saves. The solution is one-to-many problem solving.
A walkthrough of what fully autonomous data analysis looks like when it works — and where it still falls short.
We spend a lot of time asking what AI can do. Not enough time asking what we actually want it to do.
Testing LLM agent skills on a weather analysis problem — what worked, what surprised me, and what still needs work.
LLMs are surprisingly good at analysis — until the data is messy. Here's what I found testing against real-world healthcare data.
Offloading thinking to AI can make you faster. It can also make you shallower. The tradeoff is worth understanding.
There's a school of thought that scaling compute is all you need. Here's what that gets right — and wrong.
Small percentage fees have enormous compounding effects over decades. An interactive calculator to see exactly how much.
Actuaries are trained to quantify uncertainty. But there's a difference between modeling it and truly embracing it.
Complex risk adjustment models don't outperform simple ones at the plan level. The data is clear — and the implications are significant.
Benford's Law says the first digit of real-world numbers follows a predictable distribution. Healthcare billing data does not always agree.
AutoML promises to democratize data science. A look at where it actually delivers and where you still need a human in the loop.
The promise of AI in healthcare is enormous. The reality — in 2020 — is more complicated. A look at where we actually were.
Social determinants of health, genomics, and behavioral data — what they could mean for risk adjustment models.
Risk adjustment models look backward to predict forward. Here's what that tension means for payment accuracy.
A walkthrough of ACA RADV — what it is, how audits work, and what health plans need to know.
AI has gone through multiple winters and springs. What's different this time — and what's the same.
The ACA risk adjustment program hit pause in 2018. Here's what happened and what it meant for the individual market.