Tyler Shultz: AI boom is 'great opportunity to deceive people'

The Theranos whistleblower whose evidence helped put Elizabeth Holmes in federal prison says the AI boom looks familiar.

"A huge danger with AI is that I think it is really hard to do due diligence on it. It's really hard to tell the difference between what is something truly unique and new versus like, a ChatGPT wrapper… If you want to deceive people, I think this is a great opportunity to go deceive people," Tyler Shultz told the San Francisco Standard, in an interview flagged by TechCrunch.

He drew the line to Theranos explicitly. "I think the days of having a thirty-minute coffee with someone and sending them $100,000 should be over," Shultz said. "Elizabeth took that model and scaled it to $100 million." Theranos reached a $10 billion valuation on a blood-testing device that never functioned properly, and only used its own machines for a fraction of tests.

Holmes is now preparing a second act. She and partner Billy Evans are developing Haemanthus, which the article says has been informally called "Theranos 2.0" and has reportedly raised approximately $20 million. "I have this feeling of unease about what might come next," Shultz said.

The backdrop he was reacting to is loud. OpenAI's latest round was reported this week at a $1.25 trillion valuation, part of a stretch our funding tracker has logged 431 stories in over the past 90 days.