The AI Hoax That Fooled Thousands of Redditors (And Almost a Tech Journalist)

So every signal you receive as an investor right now is you should be investing in hot, buzzy AI companies. If you want to be part of the in crowd, if you want to raise a fund, if you want LPs to care, if you want founders to care. And what if that's not your thing? And I think this is an exceptionally hard time to play your own game because all of the dollars are going to a small number of firms and all of the dollars from those firms are going to a relatively narrow set of companies. So how do you play your own game when it appears like there's no money for it?

It's the week of January 5th. Welcome to the Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast. Welcome to the Learning Corner by Precursor and Happy New year. It's the first episode of 2026. We had a couple weeks off, but we are so happy to be back. I'm Mia Farnam and of course I'm joined by our GP and Managing Partner Charles Hudson, where we will be talking through the articles and goodreads that caught our team's attention past week for our first post over the last week, a Reddit thread exploded across the platform. Claiming to be written by an ex software engineer from a major food delivery company. The post detailed shocking insider revelations, algorithms allegedly rigged against customers and drivers, a priority delivery option that was supposedly just psychological manipulation, and most disturbingly, a hidden desperation score that tracked how badly drivers needed money based on how quickly they accepted low paying orders. The thread gained massive traction with thousands of reactions until it was exposed as a complete AI generated hoax. This led Casey Newton from Platformer to write the article debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit, documenting how he initially believed and then unmasked the deception. Casey engaged directly with the supposed whistleblower to pick up the scoop, doing what really any good journalist would asking for employee identification to verify his source. The whistleblower delivered what seemed like convincing evidence a photo of an Uber Eats employee badge and an 18 page technical document detailing the system infrastructure behind these disturbing practices. Casey was almost convinced until he ran the employee badge photo through a foundational LLM and asked if it was AI generated. The model responded that most or all of the image was edited or generated with Google AI. When Casey confronted the whistleblower, they immediately disappeared. So while Uber Eats can rest easy knowing these specific allegations aren't true, the incident raises important questions about AI generated misinformation and how easily it can fool even experienced journalists. And what other convincing hoaxes might be circulating Undetected What a way to enter into 2026. Immediate thoughts and reactions, Charles, from you on this one. And also, did you see the Reddit thread when the original post was shared? I know Marina shared she avoided food delivery apps once that circulated on Reddit.

It's so funny. Your suggestion. I bought a brick and I've been using Instagram and threads and Blue Sky a lot less since I got my brick and I think I'm better for it. And I went on in one of my little breaks and I saw these people being like, I always knew those food delivery. Then one of my friends texted me a picture, a screenshot of Tony Xu from Doordash being like, I don't think this is us. If it is, the people in charge, the people responsible should be brought to justice. And I was just like, wow, like, what are people talking about? And then I read it and this sounds too Black mirror to be true. Yeah, I hate to say it's like too dystopian to be true. And when I read Casey's article, the two things that stuck out with me, like, one, this is only going to get harder. And second, he has an advantage that the layperson doesn't have, which is he can email sources or people he knows and like, hey, you work at a ride sharing delivery service. The person's like, we would never write some. This is not how this is done. We would never write in this way. We would never. And then some people were like, oh, it's interesting that the prose from the text and the quality of English in the comments don't match. I think we're just going to have to get much better at this. And I think it's only going to get harder. And I wonder in a world, if you think about how much reach that post got. We talk a lot about clickbait and rage bait. This could take it to a whole nother level like this, you know, that old adage about, you know, the truth is halfway around the world. I don't know, I always butcher these things, but you know what I mean. Lies can spread really fast on the Internet, particularly when there are people who are motivated either because they're pranksters or because they want the traffic or click views. And the person, you know, got a lot of Reddit gold for this. So I, I give Kasey a lot of credit for also being, hey, I almost got not like, hey, I'm like this avenger. And I was never fooled. He was just doing what good journalists do, which is you get a piece of information, you try to verify it. And I think it's just going to become much, much harder to verify these things. I also think, as we learned with social media, eventually people realize not every photo or text or everything from purportedly from some famous person is real. I also think people will develop antibodies to this stuff, but I think it'll get worse before it gets better.

I think the quote that you were thinking of was, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on.

That's it.

Casey argues that AI is really just going to accelerate the speed of the lies and how quickly it spreads. And I could only imagine the amount of internal panic and angst probably happening at many massive tech companies or big corporations to basically be like, what internal teams do. We need to stand up to start fighting any of this. Because like you said, maybe specific people with specific skill sets can figure out what's real, what's fake. But I mean, by the time that that post had traveled, there were probably thousands of people who decided, I'm not going to order from any of these apps anymore for the next week or so. Or like, really was like, this is the end. My question is, who are the stakeholders that really have important decisions to make here and whose responsibility is it?

And I think the thing about it was it was perfectly tuned, rage bait. It took like a lot of the things that people, you know, conspiratorially or in a dystopian way think about. These apps and services kind of plugged right into. I knew it all along. This, this totally fits my mental model.

Of like, I think people wanted it to be true.

They wanted to be true. I think that's why it was so popular. Super. Like, I always knew these things had no moral fiber and they're exploitative. And look at how they even talk about the people that work on their platforms. So it reminded me a lot of the politically motivated misinformation because it tends to play on biases or feelings that are already present in the person and they provoke them in very direct and profound ways. And this one did that for sure.

And the one thing that Kasey said that struck me was in pre AI world, if somebody gives you an 18 page document, you don't really question if that's super fake because, like, who the heck is taking time, hours, resources out of their day? It's just not. That just means it's real. But here it took probably, what, 30 seconds to two minutes to spin up something like that with specific architecture around it for the average person who's on Reddit or any other public facing forum how you'd be able to suss out what's real, what's fake from now on.

I have some friends who work in expense management companies and they like six months ago were like, we're just seeing this flood of fake receipts.

What a way to splash into the new year. Well, our next piece is by Anil Dash, titled how the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026? It addresses the grim reality of mass layoffs, people leaving tech in droves, and widespread unhappiness across the industry. Many of the most talented and thoughtful people feel really gutted about what the current tech landscape looks like and what their employers actually value. With the wave of AI companies, roles that used to be highly valued, like software engineers, now feel easily replaceable. People have moved into a depressing stage of clocking in and out, unhappy in their current jobs or unsuccessful in finding new ones. Aneel's advice is to take back control by understanding the systems you're working in and what your place and role is within them. Your value is determined by how much influence you can have on the system you help architect. So understanding power dynamics is crucial and how you can meaningfully shift power from your position. He also suggests that tech opportunities with healthier cultures may not be in tech. How novel. Instead looking at industries lagging behind in innovation, where you might find better culture outside the Silicon Valley bubble. He closed with the advice to plan for the long term because this, his phase will pass. I loved his quote, don't let your job get in the way of your career. And I feel like it's very general, so it's not just applicable to here in big tech, but wanted to pause for anything from your end on what came to mind when reading this one.

When I read it, it made me remember that, you know, I've been working in tech for most of my career and I would say there have been like two big changes I've noticed. One is, I think for most of my career, probably the first 2/3, most people are like, tech is kind of, I wouldn't say universally, but generally a force for good. It makes the world better. It brings people together. Whether that was true or not, that was the belief was that tech is like this equalizing, positive force and that like, I think a lot of people were like proud to be like, oh yeah, I think back to the Arab Spring a long time ago. Facebook is helping all these people connect and you know, Google's organizing all the world's information and maybe like for me, the first moment in my career where I was like, maybe tech has a more complicated relationship with morality was, you know, I was at Google when the don't be evil stuff happened with China. And a lot of people were like, well, how do we reconcile who we say we are with the business demands of provide? And that was like, obviously a very challenging decision for the company. And then you had all the comments about, well, should tech work with defense? It seems quaint now that that was even a thing. When you think about how big defense tech and the military industrial complex relationship with tech has gone back to where it started in the beginning of time. We're very back now. Anyone who hasn't read Margot Amira's book the Code, I would highly recommend that you read it. It's a really good history of tax relationship with government. And the military goes back a long way. And then I think what happened is we went through this era of what I can only describe as warm fuzzies, employee empowerment. That happened coming out of COVID where I think employers were genuinely concerned about employee wellbeing. And even if they weren't, they realized it was important to signal that they were. And you had ergs, and you had mental health days and you had work from home. And to be clear, tech become big. And I think when I think about things like little tech stuff that YC talks about, tech used to be this underdog pirate industry that was an outsider. And now most of the really big companies by market cap are tech companies. Tech companies are some of the biggest companies in the world. Tech touches everything. And tech is no longer a little industry. And when you're a little industry, you can decide to stay out of policy. You can decide to stay out of a lot of stuff. But when you're a big business, policy impacts you. And I think tech has become a lot more political. And I think there were some folks who were really happy when tech getting political aligned with their political views around, particularly in like 2020. And now that tech is political in a different way, there's a lot of people who are like, well, I didn't sign up for that, I didn't sign up for this. And tech jobs used to be safe and secure and they're not anymore. They still pay pretty well by, by all standards. And so a lot of ways I feel like tech has become like most big industries. And I talked to my friends at big tech, they have a lot of the same complaints that my friends in big consulting, big banking, other big, big law, long Hours, low job security, questionable connection between the work they do and their values. I'm like, these are the problems of bigness. It's interesting. I have some friends who worked for the federal government who were laid off and they plan to work for the government for their whole lives. And they found other places to apply their skills in, oftentimes in the same domain, but on the other side of the table or in an adjacent industry. And I think Aneel's advice is good. Which is the upside of everything being tech is if you're software developer, you can go write code in a different industry. You don't have to work in one of the big tech companies. And I think this is the natural maturation process. And I do think part of the undertone here is I do think, maybe naively, but from a good place. I think there were a lot of people who thought tech was different. I don't know if you've seen the Paul Graham thread, like, hey, I thought when all my friends got rich, they would just be rich nerds. And that's like a very naive. But I do think as someone who's been in tech for 20 years, I think the thing that's lost is there was a long time people like, well, people in tech are different. We're not bankers and consultants. And maybe a very like condescending way. We're like, better than those people. You stand for something. We're working on problems of importance, like Robin Hoodie. Robin Hoodie. And like we're trying to make the world a better place. They're just trying to make a bunch of money. And now the tech is of similar scale. That seems to be less true, which doesn't mean it was never true. I think it's harder to argue that it's true today. And I think for people who got into tech in a more optimistic pirate y time, they're kind of like the people who joined the startup when it was 10 people and now that it's a thousand people and you have to badge in and you have to do like performance reviews, they're like, this isn't as much fun as it was when it was 10 of us around a table at 10 o' clock at night, shipping directly to production. But it's not that anymore.

Yeah. And it's not going back. I think that's like, to your point, like a feature of bigness. And I think that there are different phases of growth that suited each company at the specific time, but we're far beyond that. And so that's why I read this and it felt like specifically the quotes around people feeling like they're just clocking in and out, that could be applied to every type of job ever. When people just feel detached from the day to day work that they do.

To what the output is, that's most people's jobs. I felt like this was written for people of my generation of tech who are somewhere between their mid-30s and early-50s who join the industry in just a different era and are trying to figure out, well, did the work change? Did I change? Did the world change? And the answer is like all of those things changed.

It's all relative to my sister used to be a teacher and then pivoted into a massive public tech company. And coming from being a teacher in a lower income area in the middle of Colorado to working customer success at this massive post IPO tech company, it was like a dream come true. And so all the things that I would assume people pre IPO for this specific company would complain about, she didn't have any of the those things in mind for her. She had to walk through like what RSUs were like on the phone when she got her offer. It's almost a feature of just being in the industry for so long. You start picking apart what things used to be. One thing that this did make me think of, I mean we talk to our founders in our portfolio all the time about what their talent needs are and what the gaps look like. And it feels like reading this article, that there's a massive pool of talent that's either looking for a new job or wanting to leave their current one. Why is there this disconnect of these great people not being able to be paired with maybe newer opportunities that could put them back in that seat that they want with all this ownership and autonomy and less hierarchy.

I think some of it is nostalgia and a wistfulness for the days gone and maybe some deep down hope that those days come back. But I don't think that's likely. Second, Big tech pays really well.

Golden handcuffs.

Yeah, again, going back to like law consulting and banking. These are also jobs that are hard to leave because it's hard to replicate the combination of comp and prestige. I also think maybe for some people, say what you will like telling people you work at Amazon, Google, Facebook, Meta, whatever you want to call it these days. People recognize those brands and those brands mean something. Working for some company that makes forestry management software that no one's ever heard of, it's a different cocktail party conversation. Also I think, you know, big Tech has its own social network. We're moving from. You probably have friends. If you're just like, hey, how do I go from big tech to a small software development shop in my neighborhood? Like, how do I find these jobs? Well, those people, people value. What will they be skeptical of? Like my. I think it's hard to move. Not impossible, but hard to move.

Do you think, Charles, that feels like specifically right now, and maybe more so in San Francisco. People feel like working at the big tech companies is less of a sexy conversation in the cocktail parties than being able to say that they're working at something stealthy, something under the radar. Do you feel like that's more of the narrative now than ever?

I think if you're in San Francisco, which is a pin drop of a city in the grand scheme of the world, I do think that San Francisco's always been, other than times of recession and tech downturn, it's always been been cooler to work. If you said, would you rather say I work at Google or OpenAI or Anthropic? I think most people would be like, I think it'd be cooler to say I worked at OpenAI or Anthropic. Even though Google's doing a great job in AI too.

Yeah.

I think what's different is those startups aren't. My senses outside of research are not as aggressively poaching people from big tech as in previous cycles. It was like, hey, if you were hanging around in Google and there was an up and cominging startup, there was a good chance they were going to like make a run and try to get you to come join them. And being in those places put you in a spotlight that made you attractive. And now I feel like with all this AI stuff recruiting is so broke into where people are looking for talent. What talent looks like, what skills you need to have to be attractive. The fact that many of these companies are just simply hiring fewer people. I think this is the other thing. If you've been at one of these big tech companies for a long time and you're reentering. Everyone I know who's had to deal with a layoff has been like the job market today. You would not recognize it if you were thrust into it. It does not look like what you know. I, I believe them. I have no reason to not believe them.

Well, our last piece is by Roger Ehrenberg titled A Perspective on the Venture Business, AKA Normalizing the Insecurities We All Experience. Roger walks through all the classic challenges of the job. The highs are incredibly high. The Lows are devastatingly low. The work never stops. You can always be doing more. And the FOMO and envy are very real. The cycle never ends. And any investor can be susceptible to these feelings. It's really just part of the job. Roger's advice is while you can always be doing more and constantly looking around at what everyone else is doing, you really need to look inward and play your own game while blocking out the noise. So while his main message is play your game, he shares, if you're experiencing these feelings of self doubt and constant questioning, you're not alone. He always returns to his first principles. Do I believe in my hypothesis? Do I have an edge? Do I continue to perform well? Do I love the work that I'm doing? He ends it with really just saying you're human so you can't be completely void of these feelings. But ultimately you have to play your game. So obviously wanted your perspective here, especially since, you know Roger, I read this.

And like, you know, everyone's like, how do you know AI Slap. I'm like, well, if you know the person and you read it, I was like, this was Roger. And like, I've gone to Roger with a bunch of questions in my venture career and he's someone who was always gracious with me back when he was at IA and giving me his time and perspective. And this is something I've talked to our team about quite a bit individually and as a group. There's a lot of highs and lows in this job. And the reason I really like this post is there's always been this, like, hey, I'm doing my own thing. Hey, I'm doing deep tech and everyone else is doing SaaS, or I'm doing CPG and everyone else is doing SaaS, or I'm doing consumer and everyone else is doing SaaS. And it always felt like there was room in the industry to have a bunch of firms that were all kind of doing their own thing. And then AI hits. And I think two things happen. There are whole firms whose whole investment strategies were only doing AI. And if you're not investing in AI companies, you don't have anything to talk to those people about. They don't want to meet your other portfolio companies. They might as well be dead to them. Which is really like a hard message to hear. And second, all of the press coverage, excitement, all the sexiness, all the markups, all the LP interest is in AI. So every signal you receive as an investor right now is you should be investing in hot, buzzy AI companies. If you Want to be part of the in crowd, if you want to raise a fund, if you want LPs to care, if you want founders to care, and what if that's not your thing? And I think this is an exceptionally hard time to play your own game because usually the signals you get in venture are there's a consensus game that works for those people and there's a lot of other little ways you can win that are different. And as long as the way you're, you're playing can win, you don't have to be in the mainstream. But right now it feels like, as Roger mentioned, all of the dollars are going to a number of firms and all of the dollars from those firms are going to a relatively narrow set of companies. So how do you play your own game when it appears like there's no money for it and there's like really not much signal that playing your own game will be rewarded? And I read this, I was like, this is the kind of thing that, as I've said, everything works until it doesn't. And I think right now the hardest thing, and I have the same struggle Roger mentioned, which is I have a bunch of beliefs that feel like they're out of step with the mainstream right now. And I'm like, well, I'm going to continue to hold these beliefs because I believe they're true. It feels harder every day because all of the them inputs I'm getting suggest that you should just do what everybody else is doing. And then when the fever breaks, everyone's like, why were we all doing that? Well, you were doing it and I was copying you and it seemed like a good idea. And like, we were all like, you end up in this just weird place where everybody's copying everybody and whether it's the right thing to do or not. And so I think it's a much needed timely message. But I'll be the first to admit it is incredibly hard to do in this environment.

It feels different than other consensus bubbles to your exact point in that, I mean, as investors, part of the job is to give advice and to kind of act as a sounding board. And when the game at a broader level has shifted and changed so much that I can't predict as easily like who'll be around to support specific founders because of what lane they're sitting in anymore. Like complete investors have completely ditched their like, consumer as example, completely ditched to go in a different direction. So I'm sort of like, I gotta replenish that list entirely. If you're gonna raise a series A. I don't even know who's deploying in that direction. How do I find those people? To your point, you can do all the pre see see deals you want in consumer, but that is going to be sitting in the back of your mind. And maybe the question is then I just need to be finding businesses that don't require as much venture dollars in order to be interesting. Maybe that's a different way to look at it, but it feels much different than the previous bubbles.

And I think what you also have to accept is like you need founders who understand this too. I introduced one of our portfolio companies to a prospective investor. He goes, there's nothing wrong with this company. It's exceptional. But I'm only doing AI right now. It's funny I tell you, like you can't tell somebody what they should be excited about. I mean, you can try. I don't think that's very effective. At some point you have to accept right now AI is the game on the field. And if you're not going to play that game, you have to have high conviction and you have to, you know, remain solvent as a fund. You have to be able to like stay in business. I look at our portfolio, we have plenty of non AI businesses that are doing great. I believe at some point attention will come back to those businesses. But we have to be around and alive as a fundamental when that happens. Otherwise we don't get the prize.

Well, great close for the first episode of 2026. We are all out of time today. Thank you Charles for popping in. Thank you to our listeners and subscribers. We will talk with you all next week. Thank you. Bye bye.