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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Theranos was a great idea. The problem was that they couldn't make it work and they lied about that to everyone involved. That's different from it not being a good idea in the first place.

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Theranos wasn’t a great idea or even a good idea. The “idea” was

1. Get a drop of blood 2. … 3. Cure all diseases

That’s not even an idea. It’s just magical thinking.

No it wasn’t. They never promised anything like that.

Theranos technology was the proposition to run smart blood tests on very small volumes of blood drawn from patients on-site. That’s really about it. They couldn’t deliver this service but they never promised any cures, bro.

It was implied which led to fraud convictions. Elizabeth Holmes made misleading claims that gave the impression their technology could revolutionize disease detection and management for example by speaking about a future where people could test themselves regularly and catch disease

The fraud in Theranos for which Holmes et al were ultimately convicted was running regular blood tests (i.e., those any certified lab would run) on samples which were too small so that the blood tests gave essentially random data. Yes, they made much more outlandish claims about what they could eventually do (and at times veered into making those claims about what they could do at the present), but the actual fraud was that they couldn't even do what they were certified to do.

A good idea is an idea that possible to turn into reality, else it is just an idea.

How do you know if you can or cannot turn the idea into reality without trying?

By conducting a throughout literature review over possible methods, consulting the experts, and checking if your proposed method is within laws of physics?

I agree. If Albert Einstein had gone with your sensible approach he could have quickly ruled out his silly idea of relativity as impossible and gone back to his more important work of approving patent applications.

Venture capital is not a good way to fund theoretical work. And Einstein didn't lie about his achievements.

That there could be useful LLMs was theoretically argued about; essentially VC funding answered what wasn’t happening in academia.

In the case of LLMs I would say that VC funding made the engineering possible. The theoretical breakthroughs were largely made in IBM and Google. OpenAI certainly made some improvements to architecture and training, but ultimately they implemented a refined version of a transformer-based LLM.

But that's what venture capital and research should be about, financing ideas to see if they can be realized.

I mean, the people who put money into Theranos later should have done better due diligence, but I don't fault the initial investment.

This. Even worse: every good idea is the one that looks bad to a layman, otherwise there won't be an opportunity there: if an idea is obviously good, a lot of people already came up with it a long time ago.

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