The elephant in the room is how many builder.ai(s) are still out there.
My personal estimate is that it is about 80% of the startups you see around.
Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
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Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#152In this whole AI revolution we sometimes forget the power of cheap human labour... and if I recall correctly, that's not the first time such a thing happens. Amazon made a "no-checkout AI automated store" which was a bunch of cameras connected to a bunch of Indians. At this point, I think we should consider "Indians" a valid element of any engineering architecture, because they perfectly fill the niche where you have work that is almost easy to automate, but not quite.
Of course, "Indian-as-a-Service" doesn't sound as cool as AI, but besides this, I think it's a valid solution and a business model for many use cases.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#153Honestly I feel bad for Indians but yeah everything annoying comes from them. Scamming, call centers and worst of all Microsoft agents.
Scamming is Cambodia via the Chinese triad. That’s where all the scam farms are.
There’s a lot of poor Indians forced into slave labor conditions there by tricking them into job opportunities. But there is not a lot of call center scams run today in India. Not at the scale at which Cambodia runs them.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Technically you are wrong. The best kind of wrong.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#155The elephant in the room is how many builder.ai(s) are still out there. My personal estimate is that it is about 80% of the startups you see around.
The WITCH consultancies make tons of money delivering code of similar quality without pretending that it was done by AI.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#156So.. 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.
Typically, scams like this are very top-heavy with the vast majority of the pilfered cash going to a few well-placed "bros" at the top of the company pyramid.
My guess? Most of the cash is socked away in BTC or some such wealth sink just waiting for the individuals to clear their bothersome legal issues.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#157[deleted]
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#158This 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.
not really, lovable, v0, and bolt all are mutlipage. They connect to supabase for db and auth. Replit can spinup custom dbs on-demand, and have a full-fledged IDE.
I did my research before jumping into this space :)
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is the way. Funny how AI could also stand for Actual Intelligence. Or, Artisanal Intelligence? "Now 100% organic handcrafted thoughts, unique for your business problem."
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Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#160So.. 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.
I really wish I'd read this before starting my career as a scammer ten years ago.