Fintech Founder Charged With Fraud After 'AI' Shopping App Found To Be Powered By Humans in the Philippines 54
Albert Saniger, the founder and former CEO of Nate, an AI shopping app that promised a "universal" checkout experience, was charged with defrauding investors on Wednesday, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. From a report: Founded in 2018, Nate raised over $50 million from investors like Coatue and Forerunner Ventures, most recently raising a $38 million Series A in 2021 led by Renegade Partners. Nate said its app's users could buy from any e-commerce site with a single click, thanks to AI. In reality, however, Nate relied heavily on hundreds of human contractors in a call center in the Philippines to manually complete those purchases, the DOJ's Southern District of New York alleges.
Saniger raised millions in venture funding by claiming that Nate was able to transact online "without human intervention," except for edge cases where the AI failed to complete a transaction. But despite Nate acquiring some AI technology and hiring data scientists, its app's actual automation rate was effectively 0%, the DOJ claims.
Saniger raised millions in venture funding by claiming that Nate was able to transact online "without human intervention," except for edge cases where the AI failed to complete a transaction. But despite Nate acquiring some AI technology and hiring data scientists, its app's actual automation rate was effectively 0%, the DOJ claims.
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I dunno, who was running things in 2018 when this fraud started?
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Xi Jinping?
Re: Must be (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Must be (Score:3)
Saniger is a Spaniard, you lying sack of s#it.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-s... [justice.gov]
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Yes, it was obvious.
Some people are just complete dumbasses.
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Yes, it was obvious.
Some people are just complete dumbasses.
Of course. But disturbingly in this case, the dumarses have moderated the prime dumbarse to +5 informative. /s.
I miss the days when you could make an obviously ironic comment without needing to add
You know honestly I would blame (Score:1)
I mean if you and me had that kind of money on the line relative to our incomes you can bet your ass we would have been checking things a lot more thoroughly. But the 1% and the rich assholes did buy into this crap don't have to both
Re: You know honestly I would blame (Score:2)
Saniger is a Spaniard, you lying sack of s#it.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-s... [justice.gov]
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You are a parody of yourself at this point.
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The Republican party on a lot of this. We've had 40 years of deregulation that allows all sorts of nastiness when it comes to investment. And the other thing is is they've set things up so the really really really rich almost never lose money and almost always get a bailout. I mean if you and me had that kind of money on the line relative to our incomes you can bet your ass we would have been checking things a lot more thoroughly. But the 1% and the rich assholes did buy into this crap don't have to bother because they know that the taxpayer via the US Republican party always has their backs because if we don't they've set it up so if they go down all of us go down. One of the key things nobody talks about in our economy is the perpetual hostage situation every single one of us is in. Some of the hostages are treated better than others and every now and then one of the hostages gets handed a gun and gets to guard the other hostages but that doesn't help the rest of us
I agree with all of this, except for one minor point: The Democrats are just as apt to bail out big investors as the Republicans at this point, because the Democrats react to every loss, no matter how minor, as if the only possible way to regain voters is to move closer to the Republican ideals that people wish they had an alternative to. They're also just as likely to hand massive wads of cash to industry to "help stir the economy," because, apparently, trickle down economics, despite 40 plus years of proo
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He may not have thought of it, but he will certainly pardon it. This is pretty low on the scale of other white collar crime he has been pardoning.
Just send a check splitting the profit 50-50 to 1-800-pardonn and sit back and watch it go away.
Mechanical Turk (Score:5, Funny)
"People became suspicious when they noticed the AI's actions were unusually accurate and helpful."
(I jest; I didn't actually read anything. Just a guess.)
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"But these are humans, so isn't the collective intelligence also human?" You may well ask. Indeed it is not the case that all properties of the parts become properties of the whole. For example, humans have strictly less than 3 eyes. However, a collection
and what about Elon musk? (Score:4, Interesting)
Musk faked self-driving to defraud investors, wonder if the Trump Department of Justice will be charging him?
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I too have tried FSD in a model Y and it is leaps and bounds above what I have experience with other adaptive cruise control and lane holding techs. It is pretty cool when it pulls up to a stop sign and waits for a hole in the traffic so that it can pull out. Is there .000001% chance it will not see something? Probably, but I trust it more than the soccer mom with 3 screaming kids in the back talking on the phone to the takeout place for dinner.
If 50% of the cars on the road had this tech, I believe the ac
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I trust it to randomly fuck up, frequently. Ignoring the AI for a moment, it's a huge fragile clusterfuck with tons of hard coded boundary limits constraining the AI.
First hit from Google for FSD missing divider :
https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfD... [reddit.com]
Same old same old.
Re:and what about Elon musk? (Score:4)
Now Google "driver looking at phone runs in to divider".
FSD will only get better. Drivers will never improve.
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No matter how good the AI gets, the car manufacturers will not remove the human posed constraints they feel are necessary to trust the AI. Unfortunately there is not a single constraint you can set which won't need to be violated for actual driving.
For robotaxis this is not a problem, they don't get on the highway. They can stop as a fail safe waiting for human remote control to push it through the constraints, that will be safe 99% of the time ... this happens frequently. On the highway there is no fail sa
Re: and what about Elon musk? (Score:2)
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Getting a little deep in the semantics, aren't we. If you pull out Merriam-Websters and parse every moniker from fortune 500 companies (think "unlimited internet") you would be charging a large number of people.
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"charging a large number of people"... that sounds like it could be worthwhile.
Musk is an idiot (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the Twitter thing might not turn out to be like that but that was such an obviously stupid thing to do that only the banks and the saudi's bought into it and it was pretty clear the Saudis bought into it so that they could influenc
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Musk forced himself to buy Twitter by tweeting that he had the financial side in place, which if untrue would have been fraud. Investors were already suing him over what looked like a pump-and-dump on Twitter, so he basically had to buy it.
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"The DOJ’s indictment says that Nate ran out of money and was forced to sell its assets in January 2023, leaving its investors with “near total” losses"
Don't lose money. That is the rule. If she hadn't lost money (pivot to diaper sales or something), then Elizabeth Holmes would have stayed out of jail.
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Musk faked self-driving to defraud investors, wonder if the Trump Department of Justice will be charging him?
That depends on whether they will have a falling out. If they do, anything is possible, including Musk getting deported to a certain prison without a conviction first. He is not an US citizen after all ...
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Musk faked self-driving to defraud investors, wonder if the Trump Department of Justice will be charging him?
I dislike Musk as anyone with half a brain, a sense of self worth or a modicum of dignity but he hasn't defrauded anyone.
He's made promises he couldn't deliver on self driving and it was really up to the investors and purchasers to determine if his promises were realistic and continually evaluate if they remain realistic. Whilst purchasers have some claim to a refund, investors are expected to accept the risk.
Fraud would be having a Filipino* hidden in the drivers seat that would manipulate the pedals
He only got in trouble because he scammed the rich (Score:2)
could be buying OpenAI at bulk rates (Score:2)
<shows self out>
So copied anime? (Score:2)
I don't see the problem (Score:2)
Using the Theranos business model? (Score:3)
Fake it till you make it.
Zero surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
LLMs cannot reliably do what they are sold as being capable of doing. Some of the things claimed, they cannot do at all or only by accident. Hence it was bound to get faked at some point. The jokes about this have been around for quite a while, no surprise that reality now imitates art.
So, like in the past.... (Score:2)
...there actually IS a little man inside the mechanical Turk.
Trump DoJ can go after people who.... (Score:2)
.... defraud the rich, but they close down the Tax evasion unit that targets the rich. Fuck Trump and Musk in the ass with a chainsaw.
Nailed it... (Score:2)
Yet again, the Babylon Bee nailed it....
https://babylonbee.com/video/t... [babylonbee.com]
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Direct link to video at just the right time:
https://youtu.be/EyjnoksVSL4?t... [youtu.be]
It really was AI (Score:2)
Actual Indians!
(well, okay, Filipinos this time, but it's usually India where this happens)