GPTZero Growth Lead says education exposed the AI trust gap first

GPTZero’s Growth Lead has outlined how the AI detection platform scaled rapidly in 2025 by positioning education as the first sector to confront the risks of unreliable generative AI, before those same issues spread into research, publishing, and the wider internet.

Hriday Kemburu, Growth Lead at GPTZero, took to LinkedIn to reflect on how the AI verification company scaled from nine million dollars to twenty four million dollars in annual recurring revenue in 2025, positioning education as the first sector to confront the consequences of confident but untrustworthy AI-generated content.

GPTZero is an AI text identification platform used to assess the origin, reliability, and quality of information, with adoption across education, research, publishing, and online platforms.

Education became the earliest warning system

Kemburu wrote that his decision to join GPTZero followed growing concern about how generative AI performs when scaled, particularly in environments where accuracy, citation, and trust are non-negotiable. He compared AI’s ability to replicate persuasive language to performance rather than understanding.

Kemburu said: “AI has effectively watched that comic a million times, then run a million variations. It can be charismatic, confident, and wrong at scale, and now that is showing up in school, research, and publishing.”

He went on to describe education as the first domain where the limits of generative AI became visible, noting: “That is why I think of GPTZero as the verification layer of the internet, the guardrails for AI. Education was ground zero. Now it’s everywhere, AI slop, synthetic research, hallucinated citations.”

Growth accelerated as trust concerns spread

Kemburu outlined several initiatives that helped extend GPTZero’s reach beyond classrooms, including educator engagement, publishing partnerships, and original research into hallucinated citations.

He pointed to the company’s work with teachers as an early driver of influence. Kemburu wrote: “Built the ‘YC for AI Education,’ a teacher ambassador community with ten thousand plus educators. If your child’s teacher has an AI policy, there’s a good chance we influenced that.”

He also highlighted efforts to bring transparency into tech publishing: “Partnered with HackerNoon to bring ‘verified by GPTZero’ to tech publishing, we now analyze five thousand plus monthly submissions and show readers AI detection disclosures on published posts.”

Verification replaces authorship as the core question

According to Kemburu, the debate around AI-generated content is shifting away from whether AI was involved, toward whether content can be trusted at all. He argued that this shift is already playing out across education, research, and media: “The question is no longer just ‘was this written by AI,’ but also ‘can this be trusted.’”

He ended his post by inviting broader discussion about where verification should sit as AI-generated content becomes more common: “If you’re seeing AI slop or trust issues in your world, I’d love to hear where it shows up.”

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