Series: AI, Ego & Regret — Bonus Chapter
Editor's Note: While compiling the old series for the book, I found this draft in the archives. It didn't fit the original lineup, but the story was too good to leave buried on a hard drive. I polished it up and decided to release it as a bonus chapter for the series. This is a work of fiction.
Act I · Dead Weight
It took me six years to turn NovaTech's AI diagnostic platform from a Python script on a single server into a production system processing four million diagnostic requests a day. Every sensor pushed data upstream. The model didn't fire on every reading, but during peak hours it handled over a hundred per second. Our clients included three Fortune 500 manufacturing giants — the biggest of which was Merit Manufacturing — plus a medical device brand you've definitely used.
Six years ago when I joined, the company had eighteen people and the CTO still wrote code. CEO Ryan Whitfield pounded the table at all-hands meetings and said, "We're building something that matters."
