You may ever say in a migration that these days companies are falling to launch anything, anything, in which Ai, even a little bit, somewhere under the hood. In this way they can run dazzling advertising campaigns that make the product sound such as state-of-the-art, this new technology, which everyone is talking about.
But a technical founder, Albert Sanger, is now in warm water after accusing him of false claims about his company’s technology, as it was found that his “AI-Infeited” Universal Shopping App was actually operated by a group of people at the Philippines Call Center.
According to a release by the US Department of Justice, the 35 -year -old founder and former CEO of NAT, this week, was motivated to cheat investors funding the shopping app.
The NAT shopping app launched seven years ago and raised more than $ 50 million from various investors. Sainiger cheated investors by claiming allegedly claiming his company’s alleged AI capabilities, while employed workers to create confusion of technical automation.
NAT founder marketed the software as a universal shopping cart app, which simplified the e-commerce experience by allowing customers to leave the checkout process on retail websites, in which NATE completed the checkout process using AI to autonomally navigate the checkout process, fulfilling it from a shopkeeper in a tap.
This meant that if a shopkeeper was found, for example, a pair of shoes they wanted to buy on a special e-commerce site, they could do so by opening the NAT app and clicking “Buy”. The NAT app noted to take care of the remaining process remaining using AI to select the appropriate size, enter billing and shipping information and to confirm the purchase.
The US Attorney office said that while Saniger had actually acquired AI technology from a third party and hired a team of data scientists to develop it, AI of NAT never gained the ability to complete e-commerce shopping. The Tech founder is accused of hiding it from investors.
Instead of deploying AI, NAT instead trusted the teams of human workers, who in secret to process the transaction, which users believed to have mimicked the work being done by AI.
Saniger is alleged to have been using the “hundreds” of contractors located in a call center in the Philippines to complete the manually purchasing on the NAT app, although during a busy holiday period, the company’s engineering team also developed bots to automate some transactions.
Acting American Attorney Matthew Podolsky said of the alleged crime: “This type of deception not only afflicts innocent investors, it changes capital from legitimate startups, doubts investors about real successes, and eventually disrupts the progress of AI development.”
In 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission asked companies to look at their claims about the use of AI, warned them to avoid exaggeration and when it comes to announcing AI capabilities associated with their products.
