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

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.

Less than four years later, GPTZero has more than 20 million registered users, $30 million in annual recurring revenue, and a new parent company. Superhuman, the productivity company formerly known as Grammarly, agreed in June to acquire GPTZero for undisclosed terms. PitchBook data valued GPTZero at more than $88 million, but a source familiar with the matter said the deal represented at least a 10x return on the $13.5 million the company had raised in total.

Tian, 26, and his cofounder, Alex Cui, who have been friends since high school in Toronto, now lead a combined “authenticity” team inside Superhuman, tasked with building their detection technology into a tool used by tens of millions of writers.

This wasn’t the plan, Tian told Fortune. “I never wanted to be a founder.” He wanted to be a journalist.

The computer science major in journalism class

Tian was well on his way to becoming one. Before he graduated, he worked with investigators at Bellingcat, the open-source investigative outlet whose work has broken major stories on war crimes, espionage, and the poisoning of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. He also spent time on the BBC Eye Investigations team reporting on disinformation, and he had just accepted a fellowship with the New York Times‘ visual investigations team when GPTZero started taking off.

“I think I perfectly would have been happy working at the Times, or even in data investigations,” Tian said. He had learned firsthand, after all, from one of the masters of magazine journalism: John McPhee, the longtime New Yorker staff writer, Princeton’s Ferris Professor of Journalism, and winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World, his geological history of North America.

“It was the last year he taught his creative writing class,” Tian said, describing the funny relationship that developed as the journalism legend, then nearly 90, leaned on his only computer science student for help navigating Zoom and online learning during the pandemic. “When COVID........

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