Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz warned that the AI boom is «a great opportunity to deceive people»

A whistleblower's warning against the backdrop of the success of the Holmes film

Tyler Shultz, whose first job after university was at Theranos and who became one of the key whistleblowers who exposed the company's dangerously inaccurate blood tests, said that the current hype around artificial intelligence creates favorable conditions for deceiving investors. «If you want to deceive people, I think this is a great opportunity to go deceive people,» he said in an interview with the San Francisco Standard, which TechCrunch cites. According to him, the main danger of AI is that «it is very difficult to conduct due diligence» and distinguish a truly unique technology from «a wrapper over ChatGPT.»

Lessons of Theranos in the era of trillion-dollar valuations

Shultz drew a direct parallel to the Theranos case: the company reached a valuation of about $10 billion, although its technology never worked — its own devices were used for only a small portion of the tests, the rest were performed on third-party equipment, and faulty results were received by real patients through Walgreens store locations. The funding largely came from private investors, including the DeVos and Walton families, rather than from venture funds: Theranos refused to share scientific data, citing trade secrets, which deterred many top Silicon Valley venture firms. «The days when a thirty-minute cup of coffee was enough to send someone $100,000 should be over. Elizabeth took that model and scaled it to $100 million,» the San Francisco Standard quotes Shultz as saying. He added that, in his opinion, Holmes «pulled off the largest angel funding round in history,» and his grandfather, former US Secretary of State and Treasury Secretary George Shultz, was himself an investor and a member of the company's board of directors. The warning comes amid the fact that, as TechCrunch notes, companies that have never made a profit are now raising capital at trillion-dollar valuations.

The film, «Theranos 2.0» and Holmes's «second act»

The occasion for the new remarks was the documentary film «You Can See Everything» by directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Holmes's final weeks of freedom before serving a sentence of more than 11 years. The film, which according to TechCrunch became one of the highest-grossing documentaries, deliberately does not characterize Holmes as either a manipulator or a victim, but shows her ability to evoke pity even in people who know about her crimes. In the film, Holmes and her partner, heir to a hotel empire Billy Evans, are working on the diagnostics company Haemanthus, which they themselves call «Theranos 2.0» and which, according to reports, has raised about $20 million. Shultz noted that the film glosses over more serious episodes — the delivery of dangerously incorrect medical data to patients and the targeted harassment he himself was subjected to, after warning about problems at the company. «I have a feeling of anxiety about what comes next. She is definitely preparing and starting her second act, and I don't know where it will lead,» the San Francisco Standard quotes him as saying.