> this was for our first few beta customers from 2017 and we made it clear that there was a human in the loop of the service. LLMs didn't exist yet. It was like offering an EA for $100/mo - several other startups did that as well, but obviously it doesn't scale.
So not necessarily fraud unless they deceived investors. Or he’s covering up his mistake. Getting the popcorn!!
That's not from the LI post from the CTO that the story (or the Futurism story the linked story is apparently rereporting) is based on [0], which has the same straight-up fraud description as appears in both stories: “We told our customers there's an "AI that'll join a meeting.” In reality it was just me and my co-founder calling in to the meeting sitting there silently and taking notes by hand.”
Your quote seems likely to be from an after-the-fact damage control “clarification” post by the CEO [1] describing that the early users as close friends, who knew that it was human assisted and not machine transcription (I say seems likely to be because it expresses something similar to what you claim but slightly more distant from the original story, and doesn't have the quote you present, but it is marked as edited so it seems plausible that it at one point had your quote but decided that it needed even a stronger rewrite of the narrative for PR reasons.)
1. It's not fraud. They were proving the market at an early stage while living on a pizza diet.
2. Their startup now does what it says on the tin. And it's now a unicorn.
3. To those claiming this was "unethical" - a large company providing this service would still record calls and have QA / engineers listening to calls to improve the service.
What the news article and the original post from the CTO clearly and describes is fraud: the service being sold on explicit, false pretenses.
What the later post from the CEO describes (and presents as a calrification, but it conflicts with rather than clarifies the initial description) is not fraud, but the question is was the CTO being loose with the truth to paint a rebel image or is the CEO. being loose with the truth to try to protect the company image after the CTO’s post got picked up by multiple news outlets and people were correctly pointing out that it described fraud?
+1, this strategy is often called a "concierge" MVP. You deliver the service you claim, but behind the scenes everything is actually incredible manual. Once you proved people like the service, you then go make the process less manual. Zappos and Amazon are both famous for doing this.
customers pay for the service, not the method-by-which-the-service-is-provided. If they explicitly sold it as a service without a human in the loop, then I think that's bad. If they just sold transcription..... then this is transcription.
> this was for our first few beta customers from 2017 and we made it clear that there was a human in the loop of the service. LLMs didn't exist yet. It was like offering an EA for $100/mo - several other startups did that as well, but obviously it doesn't scale.
So not necessarily fraud unless they deceived investors. Or he’s covering up his mistake. Getting the popcorn!!