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.
[deleted]
Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
141–150 of 283 posts
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#142> 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…
[deleted]
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
... and what if Twitter does it? Because at the very least they killed most countermeasures to bots and a serious percentage of activity on twitter is "fake engagement". I also have a much more difficult question: Could you explain how this fraud works/applies if nation states are the ones developing the bots? Is there a difference between foreign and US bots?
It's not complicated. If a company knowingly misrepresents their user activity then it's fraud. Knowing that a significant portion of your user activity is bots but then claiming you don't have bots would be fraud.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft invested £250M in Inflection AI, £250M in Builder.ai, and has backed several other companies working on LLMs. They’ve been placing strategic bets across the AI space, but only a few of those companies actually had the talent, infrastructure, and funding needed to build real models. The VP of AI was Craig Saunders, the same person who helped create Amazon Alexa. The problem is, they ran out of money. $500 mi…
DeepSeek cost just over $5M to train. StarCoder cost around $1M, there is no info for Starcoder2 but unlikely to be more than a few million. The idea of spending billions in training is OpenAI trying to build a moat that might not actually exist.
These architectures didn't exist last year. The Chinese are innovating thanks to massive government backing, access to talent, and a clear focus on winning the AI race.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
$400M! I get $100M. Maybe even $200M. But $400M? Unforgivable.
You figure 700 employees. 400m. Avg cost per hooker can't be more than a few hundred. So by this math each employee got 1,900ish hookers. Since i figure male hookers for the female employees where cheaper well round up to 2,000. That is in fact unforgivable. 1,000 would of been acceptable. 2,000... just excess
Did you factor in the nose candy?
That estimate seems off. Please crunch the numbers once again. Make sure to factor in inflation.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#146So.. where did the $450M go? A team of 700 developers in India built over eight years would have cost a fraction of that.
Why do you think it would be to pay for actual costs? The whole point of running a scam is to spend the money.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#147Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft invested £250M in Inflection AI, £250M in Builder.ai, and has backed several other companies working on LLMs. They’ve been placing strategic bets across the AI space, but only a few of those companies actually had the talent, infrastructure, and funding needed to build real models. The VP of AI was Craig Saunders, the same person who helped create Amazon Alexa. The problem is, they ran out of money. $500 mi…
This is why I think ai is basically the death of startups as we know them. Only big players can even take a swing. No more underdog garage startups, unless you're just downstream getting dorty bath water from the big boys. Ai all around is purely about consolidation of power and money. It's bad for workers and ultimately probably bad for the startup world and competition more broadly.
I agree. The infra side is dominated by VCs and big players. And the data is in the hands of regulators, who are looking the other way.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
At least at Sam's, cameras glimpse in your cart and seems to apply some kind of trust score. Usually, the person at the exit just waves me by, sometimes if the cart is really loaded with odd items or I've already bagged some things they'll want to take a peek.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#150This 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.