Why Is the New York Times Laundering the Reputation of a Sleazy AI Startup? ⇥ futurism.com

Maggie Harrison Dupré, Futurism:

On Thursday, the New York Times published a glowing profile of a company called Medvi. The basic premise of the piece is that a single guy named Matthew Gallagher had used AI to rapidly build a pharmaceutical enterprise that’s on track to do nearly $2 billion in sales this year, while hiring only a skeleton crew of humans to operate the vast AI-powered venture. According to the NYT, it’s a stunning achievement that heralds a new era of business; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who predicted the rise of this kind of company back in 2024, told the newspaper that he’d “like to meet the guy” behind the project.

“A $1.8 billion company with just two employees?” the NYT rhapsodized. “In the age of AI, it’s increasingly possible.”

The NYT’s tech coverage is generally pretty solid. But the framing of its story, and what it left out, left us pretty stunned. That’s because back in May of last year, we ran our own investigation of Medvi — and not only was what we found far more disturbing than the NYT’s credulous story let on, but the situation has gotten even worse since then.

The Times should be retracting this story. Instead, when I opened its app this morning, it was featuring the story in its “In Case You Missed It” section.