‘We don’t want to be a policeman of the internet’: How a student of John McPhee turned GPTZero into a $30 million AI

Edward Tian built GPTZero over winter break of his senior year at Princeton, in the disorienting weeks after ChatGPT went mainstream, and put it up on a free Streamlit hosting page. The site crashed within a week as 30,000 people flocked to a program that could tell you how much of a piece of online writing was produced by AI.