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Arguably, Theranos was also somewhere in a gray area between marketing and fraud. Everyone in the industry incentivizes and participates in this behavior, but

Arguably, Theranos was also somewhere in a gray area between marketing and fraud. Everyone in the industry incentivizes and participates in this behavior, but once in a while, let's grab a few stand-out individuals to scapegoat once in a while for all the harm caused by/to the entire group with this behavior. Make sure you pick someone big/ugly enough to be credibly dangerous to the whole group, but who isn't too dangerous and well connected so that you can be sure that when the card flips on them everyone around them scatters. It's the same reason groups of individual humans do it: Scapegoating is a much lower resistance path to follow than the horrifying alternative (self-consciousness, reflection, love)

pyman 1y ago
Theranos was dealing with people's health. Misdiagnoses, delayed treatments, etc, that's real harm. Imo, comparing that to building web apps isn't the same.
- Retric 1y ago
  Theranos was using the same testing equipment and techniques as any other lab for most of their diagnostic services. Which is how they avoided being instantly exposed when their results ended up being meaningless. “In October 2015, John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal reported that Theranos was using traditional blood testing machines instead of the company's Edison devices to run its tests, and that the company's Edison machines might provide inaccurate results.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos They did plenty of shady shit including producing poor results, but that’s largely incompetence independent of fraud vs intentionally putting people’s lives on the line. IMO, the fraud kind of hides the equally important story where incompetent 19 year old collage dropout shockingly doesn’t know how to effectively setup and manage complex systems.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- aprilthird2021 1y ago
  The actual crime Theranos founder went to jail for was not misdiagnosing people. It was defrauding investors because they made them believe their machines were doing the tests when really they were sending them out to separate labs
  - pyman 1y ago
    Completely different story. With Theranos the investors sued the founders, with Builder AI they didn't. This suggests they knew what was really going on, so it wasn't fraud in their eyes.
    - aprilthird2021 1y ago
      It is not a completely different story. The lender yanked back the money they lent because they found out about fraudulent sales numbers. That led to the bankruptcy. It was still the people whose money was in the game who brought the company down in both scenarios because fraud is a big red line for anyone whose money is on the line
      - pyman 1y ago
        I understand where you're coming from, but we need to stick to the facts. If there are no court cases, we can't imply that fraud was committed. We don't know what kind of agreements were in place, why the money was being transferred, or what the expectations were on both sides. We also don't know what was discussed in private. For example, it could have been something like: "We want to be part of this investment opportunity, we'll give you $40 million. But if regulators start asking questions, we want the money back." Without full context or legal findings, everything else is just speculation. I'm surprised no one is talking about Microsoft's investment in BuilderAI, a total loss. It's unlikely they'll recover much, if anything. So why aren't they suing the CEO and CFO? Maybe some of the issues were handled quietly behind the scenes to avoid public exposure or reputational damage? I don't know.
        aprilthird2021 1y ago
lotsofpulp 1y ago
>Arguably, Theranos was also somewhere in a gray area between marketing and fraud. Theranos was clear fraud. She claimed scientific advances that did not exist.
- mistercheph 1y ago
  What about traditional auto manufacturers making claims about solid state battery technology they will achieve in the next decade that they haven't yet? There are always unsolved engineering and scientific challenges that stand between today and future product, and nothing is guaranteed, but you have to sell investors on the future technology (see: frontier model makers pushing AGI/ASI hype) Obviously there are differences between Toyota's SS battery claims and Theranos' claims, but it's not a black and white line, it's a spectrum.
  - aprilthird2021 1y ago
    Why are so many people here pretending fraud is ambiguous? Saying "We will have great batteries 10 years from now" is not fraud. It's your belief about the future. Everyone knows no one can predict the future. Saying "this hydrogen powered truck works, here is a video of it running on the road right now" but the video is edited so you don't see that it's going down hill and the car isn't actually running" that's fraud. Theranos wasn't in trouble for saying their machines would be great one day. They got in trouble for lying about the current state of things, saying they were performing blood tests on their machines when they were not.
    - mistercheph 1y ago
      I'll give you a more temporally synchronous example if you like, Microsoft's deliberately misleading claims about their quantum computing progress: https://www.science.org/content/article/debate-erupts-around-microsoft-s-blockbuster-quantum-computing-claims https://www.science.org/content/article/debate-erupts-around...
    - pyman 1y ago
      BuilderAI never actually told customers that development was done using AI, that's something people made up after the company went bust. If you look at their website (builder.ai), they explain that their virtual assistant "Natasha" assigns a developer, and then uses face recognition to verify the identity of the developer. Take a minute to visit their site and get informed. We live in a time where people form opinions just by reading a headline.

pyman 1y ago

Theranos was dealing with people's health. Misdiagnoses, delayed treatments, etc, that's real harm. Imo, comparing that to building web apps isn't the same.

Retric 1y ago
Theranos was using the same testing equipment and techniques as any other lab for most of their diagnostic services. Which is how they avoided being instantly exposed when their results ended up being meaningless. “In October 2015, John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal reported that Theranos was using traditional blood testing machines instead of the company's Edison devices to run its tests, and that the company's Edison machines might provide inaccurate results.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos They did plenty of shady shit including producing poor results, but that’s largely incompetence independent of fraud vs intentionally putting people’s lives on the line. IMO, the fraud kind of hides the equally important story where incompetent 19 year old collage dropout shockingly doesn’t know how to effectively setup and manage complex systems.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
aprilthird2021 1y ago
The actual crime Theranos founder went to jail for was not misdiagnosing people. It was defrauding investors because they made them believe their machines were doing the tests when really they were sending them out to separate labs
- pyman 1y ago
  Completely different story. With Theranos the investors sued the founders, with Builder AI they didn't. This suggests they knew what was really going on, so it wasn't fraud in their eyes.
  - aprilthird2021 1y ago
    It is not a completely different story. The lender yanked back the money they lent because they found out about fraudulent sales numbers. That led to the bankruptcy. It was still the people whose money was in the game who brought the company down in both scenarios because fraud is a big red line for anyone whose money is on the line
    - pyman 1y ago
      I understand where you're coming from, but we need to stick to the facts. If there are no court cases, we can't imply that fraud was committed. We don't know what kind of agreements were in place, why the money was being transferred, or what the expectations were on both sides. We also don't know what was discussed in private. For example, it could have been something like: "We want to be part of this investment opportunity, we'll give you $40 million. But if regulators start asking questions, we want the money back." Without full context or legal findings, everything else is just speculation. I'm surprised no one is talking about Microsoft's investment in BuilderAI, a total loss. It's unlikely they'll recover much, if anything. So why aren't they suing the CEO and CFO? Maybe some of the issues were handled quietly behind the scenes to avoid public exposure or reputational damage? I don't know.
      - aprilthird2021 1y ago

lotsofpulp 1y ago

>Arguably, Theranos was also somewhere in a gray area between marketing and fraud. Theranos was clear fraud. She claimed scientific advances that did not exist.

mistercheph 1y ago
What about traditional auto manufacturers making claims about solid state battery technology they will achieve in the next decade that they haven't yet? There are always unsolved engineering and scientific challenges that stand between today and future product, and nothing is guaranteed, but you have to sell investors on the future technology (see: frontier model makers pushing AGI/ASI hype) Obviously there are differences between Toyota's SS battery claims and Theranos' claims, but it's not a black and white line, it's a spectrum.
- aprilthird2021 1y ago
  Why are so many people here pretending fraud is ambiguous? Saying "We will have great batteries 10 years from now" is not fraud. It's your belief about the future. Everyone knows no one can predict the future. Saying "this hydrogen powered truck works, here is a video of it running on the road right now" but the video is edited so you don't see that it's going down hill and the car isn't actually running" that's fraud. Theranos wasn't in trouble for saying their machines would be great one day. They got in trouble for lying about the current state of things, saying they were performing blood tests on their machines when they were not.
  - mistercheph 1y ago
    I'll give you a more temporally synchronous example if you like, Microsoft's deliberately misleading claims about their quantum computing progress: https://www.science.org/content/article/debate-erupts-around-microsoft-s-blockbuster-quantum-computing-claims https://www.science.org/content/article/debate-erupts-around...
  - pyman 1y ago
    BuilderAI never actually told customers that development was done using AI, that's something people made up after the company went bust. If you look at their website (builder.ai), they explain that their virtual assistant "Natasha" assigns a developer, and then uses face recognition to verify the identity of the developer. Take a minute to visit their site and get informed. We live in a time where people form opinions just by reading a headline.