Do things that don’t scale taken to another level :)
Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
121–130 of 283 posts
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
See: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240611122778/en/Bui...
Depends on how you define real. I would argue that GPT-2 was a real LLM and it almost certainly cost a lot less than a billion. I'm sure there are much better examples.
Can you imagine Builder.ai using a model that argues with their clients or discriminates against them? I don't think so. GPT-2 is like bringing a knife to a gunfight in 2025.
If you want to compete with the likes of GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini today, you're looking at billions, just for training, not counting infra, data pipelines, evals, red teaming, and everything else that comes with it.
Builder.ai wasn't able to use GenAI to actually build software. And when the money ran out and no model was ever announced, investors lost trust and clients lost patience.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#123This is so weird, its not that hard to actually build an app builder. There are multiple open-source repos (bolt etc), they could have just paid their "AI engineer" to actually build an AI engineer. Shameless plug, but we built ( https://v1.slashml.com ), in roughly 2 weeks. Granted its not as mature, but we don't have billions :)
> its not that hard to actually build an app builder
Besides simple one page self-contained apps, yes, it's quite hard. So hard that it's still an unsolved problem.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
actually he should buy the bankrupt name and be the same company
I expect the builder.ai story will break into the mainstream via a book / documentary. There are some insane details and it's the first large-scale AI hype failure - which people are hungry to get the details on - and some big names involved. Another failure of dd - I really wonder how high-profile investors pour hundreds of millions into a co without doing something simple like ordering an app using a burner account…
maybe this is the first large solely AI failure but algorithms and AIs have done lots of damage before. There have been flash crashes on Wall St, Zillow lost $1B using an algorithm to try and house flip, Klarna is circling the drain after hyping up AI, etc.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#125> Linas Beliūnas, Director of the financial company Zero Hash, recently exposed that Builder.ai lacked true AI, instead utilising a group of Indian developers who were merely pretending to be bots writing code. They probably had to train people to talk like ChatGPT. Step 0: Make sure you have an em dash shortcut on your keyboard and use that as often as possible. Step 1: Be extremely polite and apologize profusely. S…
Step 2: Do the needful
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Capitalism rewards dishonesty. Every company is a grifter to some degree. This is more widespread in technical service companies.
In eastern europe (COMECON) during the cold war days, the factories were famous for cranking out products that claimed to do something but did not deliver on the promise. Did they do that because they were run by capitalists? Google China melamine contaminated milk.
I find it hard to believe any claim that they weren't capitalists. Almost nothing in the USSR was operated or managed by worker collectives. Nor in China. A handful of people managed the capital of these businesses and profited off them, and the people who own, operate, and profit off of capital investments are capitalists, even if they slap a PR sign up claiming they aren't.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Apple stores work the same way, except that it is truly “scan and go”, whereas Walmart makes you show a digital receipt. What happens if you steal? I dunno, without checking I’m pretty sure you need an Apple account to use the app, so maybe that gets revoked. Or maybe Apple’s stuff simply works well enough.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#128So.. where did the $450M go? A team of 700 developers in India built over eight years would have cost a fraction of that.
How do you figure? $450M / 8 years / 700 developers = $80k / year per developer.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#129AI = Actual Indians, apparently.
It's happening in every industry. CEOs moving back office jobs to India and telling Wall St they replaced the jobs with "AI" to get a stock price boost. I'm convinced this dynamic is a major cause of the "white collar recession" we're experiencing now. Perhaps the intent is to eventually replace the Indians with AI (Artificial Intelligence), but right now it's very much AI (Anonymous Indians) doing the work.
Is this how the Trump administration imagines bringing jobs back to America by not regulating tech companies?
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#130> Linas Beliūnas, Director of the financial company Zero Hash, recently exposed that Builder.ai lacked true AI, instead utilising a group of Indian developers who were merely pretending to be bots writing code. They probably had to train people to talk like ChatGPT. Step 0: Make sure you have an em dash shortcut on your keyboard and use that as often as possible. Step 1: Be extremely polite and apologize profusely. S…
Probably they just wrote code and that was fed into an LLM which LLMified the responses.