Ibrahim Denis Fofanah
Data Scientist & AI Researcher
Data scientist and AI researcher at Pace University. I coined Artificial Frictional Unemployment, and built the first machine learning model for crop yield prediction in Sierra Leone. Author of Understanding Agentic AI. I write about agentic systems and applied ML, with a bias toward what actually works, and who gets left out when it doesn't.
OpenAI Got 6× Better CPU Efficiency With Rust. The Lesson Is Why They Waited.
OpenAI’s storage service once pushed more than 20 million requests per second through Python. A Rust rewrite later delivered 6× better CPU efficiency and 15× better memory efficiency. The useful engineering lesson is not “rewrite everything in Rust.” It is why OpenAI knowingly carried the slower system first.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·16 min
Quantizing Half the Attention Hurt. Quantizing Both Paths Barely Did.
Quantizing one attention path cost TabPFN-v3 as much as 31.8 Elo. Quantizing both cut the drop to roughly one point and enabled up to 1.7× faster inference. The result is a lesson about consistency, not just FP8.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·12 min
93% of the Hard Corporate Links Never Reach the Matcher
A new benchmark built from 6.6 million federal contract records exposes a failure that better embeddings cannot fix. On corporate relationships where the names give the relationship away least, 93.2% disappear before the matching model ever sees them.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·11 min
Your Model Works in a Notebook. That Is the Easy Part.
A notebook proves a model can work once. Production requires it to work continuously, on unseen data, within a budget, and to fail safely. The five questions that define the gap, and why deployment is the scarce skill.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·7 min
GPT-5.6 Sol Cheated Its Own Evaluation. METR Says That Is the Reassuring Part.
METR's GPT-5.6 Sol evaluation produced three different time-horizon numbers depending on how cheating was counted, and METR says none of them measure the model. The two things the coverage missed matter more.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·8 min
The Weather Forecast Was Wrong in a Predictable Way
A lightweight machine-learning correction doubled the reported average skill of ECMWF’s subseasonal AI forecasts and won a real-time forecasting competition. The larger lesson is useful far beyond weather: before replacing a model, find out whether its mistakes are systematic enough to learn.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·12 min
Your SQL Query Did Not Fail. NULL Changed the Question.
NULL does not mean zero, blank, or false. It introduces UNKNOWN, and that third truth value can quietly change filters, exclusions, joins, and aggregates.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·10 min
Korea and AfDB Announced an Africa AI Hub. The Missing Number Is the Budget.
Korea and the AfDB announced an Africa AI Hub, but the public agreement discloses no budget, governance model or delivery targets. Here is the scorecard that would turn intent into infrastructure.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·8 min
Africa’s Agricultural AI Has an Invisible Bottleneck: Ground Truth
Ten African countries already have rich farm-survey infrastructure. The hard part is turning it into interoperable, privacy-safe ground truth for agricultural AI.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·8 min
Your KPI Needs a Contract: Build Metrics That Survive Dashboards and AI
A metric is more than an aggregation. Define its entity, grain, time, eligibility, joins, tests, and change policy so dashboards and AI return the same answer.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 25, 2026·9 min
Data Science Is Growing 34.6%. The Entry Door Is Still Getting Narrower.
BLS projects data-scientist employment to grow 34.6% through 2035. That does not mean the first job is easier to get: AI is changing junior work and raising the value of judgment, verification and context.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 18, 2026·7 min
AI Is Broadening Jobs Before Titles Change. The Evidence Is Narrower Than It Sounds.
OpenAI found that some workers repeatedly used AI for tasks outside their occupational boundaries. The signal is real, but the sample is a selected slice of active ChatGPT users, not the workforce.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 17, 2026·8 min
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