The CFPB is permanently banning BloomTech from consumer lending activities and its CEO, Austen Allred, from student lending for a period of ten years.
Allred founded BloomTech, which rebranded from the Lambda School in 2022 after cutting half its staff, in 2017.
(According to the CFPB, BloomTech originated “at least” 11,000 such loans.)
BloomTech didn’t market the loans as such, saying that they didn’t create debt and were “risk free,” and advertised a 71%-86% job placement rate.
And, unbeknownst to many students, BloomTech was selling a portion of its loans to investors while depriving recipients of rights they should’ve had under a federal protection known as the Holder Rule.
According to Stanford’s 2021 Artificial Intelligence Index Report, the number of new AI Ph.D. graduates in North America entering the AI industry post-graduation grew from 44.4% in 2010 to around 48% in 2019.
By contrast, the share of new AI Ph.D.s entering academia dropped by 44% from 42.1% in 2010 to 23.7% in 2019.
Private industry’s willingness to pay top dollar for AI talent is likely a contributing factor.
While AI graduates are no doubt welcoming the trend — who wouldn’t kill for a starting salary that high?
Between 2004 and 2019, Carnegie Mellon alone saw 16 AI faculty members depart, and the Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Washington lost roughly a dozen each, the study found.
Two years after its public debut, Mineral has become an Alphabet company. Previously known as the “Computational Agriculture Project,” the team recently graduated from X ‘moonshot’ labs. Elliott Grant, CEO…
