Tyler Shultz helped expose the blood-testing fraud at Theranos. He now says AI is hard to vet, and investors need to do real due diligence. Few laws govern AI, he added, which makes it hard for people inside AI companies to blow the whistle.
Shultz spoke to Theo Baker on The San Francisco Standard’s PST podcast. Baker was sitting in for the host, Emily Dreyfuss. The interview comes as a new film has put Elizabeth Holmes back in the news. “You Can See Everything”, by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, follows the Theranos founder’s last weeks before prison.
Baker asked whether the flood of money into AI raises the risk of another Theranos. Shultz said capabilities a company does not have, or may never have, are not hard to fake.
“It’s really hard to tell the difference between what is like something truly unique and new versus like a ChatGPT wrapper,” Shultz said.
Anyone who wants to deceive people has a great opportunity now, he said. Investors need to keep their guard up.
“I think the days of having a 30-minute coffee with someone and sending them $100,000 should be over,” he said.
Holmes took that model and scaled it to $100m, raising what Shultz called the biggest angel round of all time. On paper, the Theranos investors were the victims, he said. In his view, they were also enablers. Their lack of due diligence handed her power she should never have had.
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