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Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?

ibtimes.co.uk

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Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?

#91

Post by MangoToupe »

Aurornis wrote: post #85
zachncst wrote: post #62

Isn’t this what they always tell startups to do? Fake it and get product market fit. I recall the stories of task rabbit where the founder was delivering all the meals.

"Fake it till you make it" was about presenting yourself as an established, stable company to overcome objections about using a startup. Things like having a "Customer Support" phone number and e-mail address that just go to the founders, for example. It's fair game if the founders are actually picking up the phone and doing customer support, and it overcomes one objection people might have about using a startup inst…

There's a good deal of grey-area there, for instance in faking user activity in social media startups. Reddit did this for instance, although I don't know if they reported active user numbers as part of fundraising.

Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?

#93

Post by joshuahedlund »

belter wrote: post #15

Beaten to death: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Builder.ai

This looks like the first submission to get traction on this latest development.

Thanks for the search though:

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30397201

This one from 3 yrs ago had some interesting comments

> off topic, but they have a very suspect pricing page: https://www.builder.ai/studio-store

> "Delivery: 12 weeks"

> is Builder.ai just a CRUD app for indian sweatshops to build the apps?

> > It would not have spawned an entire industry and no code websites every other week or so if it was ‘just a CRUD app’.

Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?

#94

Post by Aurornis »

MangoToupe wrote: post #91
Aurornis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fake it till you make it" was about presenting yourself as an established, stable company to overcome objections about using a startup. Things like having a "Customer Support" phone number and e-mail address that just go to the founders, for example. It's fair game if the founders are actually picking up the phone and doing customer support, and it overcomes one objection people might have about using a startup inst…

There's a good deal of grey-area there, for instance in faking user activity in social media startups. Reddit did this for instance, although I don't know if they reported active user numbers as part of fundraising.

If Reddit create a material number of fake accounts and reported those as a key metric for fundraising, that would be fraud.

I think the story has been exaggerated a lot, though. The original story was that the admins were doing real submission activity (links, etc.) but they had a mechanism to create a new user account with the submission. So they created a lot of new user accounts for themselves, but the activity was real and driven by the founders.

We all have test accounts on our production systems. If it's a tiny number of the overall users at time of fundraising it doesn't matter. On the other hand if they created 10,000 accounts and then claimed they had 11,000 users that would be blatant fraud. I really don't think they did anything like that, though. I think they seeded the very initial site with content and made different "accounts" for it, but by the time they raised they had real traffic.

Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?

#95

Post by thatguy0900 »

vel0city wrote: post #51
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Also happened with Amazon's "Just Walk Out Technology:" https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...

I wish more stores would just do something like Scan and Go at Sam's Club. By far the smoothest checkout experience I've ever used. https://tech.walmart.com/content/walmart-global-tech/en_us/b...

I wonder if that only really works becuase Sam's club can just revoke your membership if you steal

Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?

#96

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

dmazin wrote: post #43
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Also happened with Amazon's "Just Walk Out Technology:" https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...

My understanding is this turned out not to be true. People were used to label stuff for new stores, but the actual implementation did not depend on some sort of fakery.

That was the original idea, and that's what Amazon claimed, but IIRC they never got over 70% automated.

Phrased differently, 30% of all transactions were still entered by a human overseas watching cameras at the time they decided to pull the plug, years after the initial launch.

Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?

#98

Post by oblio »

tacheiordache wrote: post #74
pyman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240611122778/en/Bui...

You say that as if Amazon Alexa was some kind of amazing product. t succeeded because it has Amazon backing and it's kindof a crappy product.

All voice assistants, at least the original iterations, are only good for 3-4 trivial things people actually want. And they've been around for a decade at this point.

Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?

#100

Post by more_corn »

wongarsu wrote: post #24
Ancalagon wrote: post #3

Really weird considering how much AI is actually available now

If you have an idea for a cool AI startup it's faster to build your first prototype without the actual AI, just faking that part. But if your Actual Indians had 95% accuracy and you can't get an AI to do more than 85% then you are kind of stuck if you raised money and got customers pretending that your Actual Indians are Artificial Intelligence.

Not true it’s super easy to fine tune and deploy one of the open models. I should teach a course.
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