Earlier quoted context omitted.
Average salary for a developer in India is about 1/10th of that.
No, it's not
It is
Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
231–240 of 283 posts
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Auto pilot is pretty good at driving within the same lane. Just like a plane pilot needs to do the more complicated stuff like take off and landing, one can expect the same with autopilot (just changing lanes and stopping at lights or stop signs or turning). Full self driving is the mislabeled one. Should be “90% self driving”.
> plane pilot needs to do the more complicated stuff like take off and landing Auto landing test 3 days ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eijEPsSdqg8
Interesting. For marketing purposes, however, I would think almost all people still associate auto pilot with just cruising in the air, similar to cruising on a highway.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 :)
Which ones prevent anybody with a browser accessing other user's data? I have been discussing vibe coding and Supabase's Postgres row level security misconfiguration.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#234I've read indications that this was always aimed at hybrid model rather than pure AI, but hard to tell now because all the news is on this indians train.
Sounds a little more reasonable. In 2016, Builder's founding, Uber was pursuing self driving as well as hiring human drivers.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you figure? $450M / 8 years / 700 developers = $80k / year per developer.
Average salary for a developer in India is about 1/10th of that.
That hasn't been the case in like 20 years. Engineering salaries are around 40K USD, although they can even stretch into the six figures for major companies with deep pockets wanting to attract elite talent. The band is pretty wide and is largely based on whether you work in a body shop consultancy (low end) or a major tech company like Google (high end).
And, like many things in this world, you'll find you'll pay for what you get.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#236Earlier 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.
That's why I specified the eastern european countries where many of the factories actually were controlled by the unions. They themselves acknowledged that they were fudging their numbers on a regular basis to get undeserved bonus money for workers.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#237Earlier 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.
Not true it’s super easy to fine tune and deploy one of the open models. I should teach a course.
The technical aspects of training and tuning are trivial. GP is pointing out that you might not be able to get the model to succeed at the task as often for any number of reasons that you won't know before you actually train one.
Although I guess your point is that it's also cheap to train them, probably cheaper than doing this. But startups are started by social people, not technical people. Stuff like this will always be expensive for social people since they have to pay one of us to do it. YC interviews their CEOs from time to time, it's really clear that's how that works.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a more-or-less useful adage in investing: scared money don't make money. Startups will always carry a risk, and VCs are not betting that the company will be asymptotically good, just good enough to make an exit.
> VCs are not betting that the company will be asymptotically good, just good enough to make an exit. This is a misunderstanding of VC investment. Any competent VC expects most of their investments to go to zero. They're hoping a small percent of their investments will make up for the losses. The goal of a decent VC isn't to avoid bad investments so much as it is to make sure they get one good investment. A good inve…
> This is a misunderstanding of VC investment. Any competent VC expects most of their investments to go to zero.
I'll be doing a linguistic nit pick now, as I felt it was a bit harsh to label my statement as a misunderstanding.
The bet is still on each investment to have a good exit. With the implied assumption that betting is a probabilistic game.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#239Earlier 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.
Thank you for pointing out that this has nothing to do with capitalism.
Humans are dishonest, and implying that that doesn't manifest in other economic systems is willfully and maliciously false, a statement only used by propagandists.
Re: Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starcoder was released in 2023, by french/american companies, and there were other coding models before it. That was right around the time this company had a new $250M funding round, so lack of resources to invest in actual AI is a terrible excuse.
StarCoder is an open-source LLM for code, not text. Builder.ai told investors they were building a virtual assistant called "Natasha", not a code assistant. I'm just telling you what I read online. Builder.ai wasn't competing with GitHub Copilot, Cody, or CodeWhisperer. Those are code assistants for developers. Builder.ai was building a virtual assistant for customers. It meant to "talk" to clients, gather requiremen…
The point is that one doesn't need billions to create useful models — there is no reason they would need new foundation models in the first place — and that 'running out of money' is unlikely to have been their main problem, 250M should be more than enough to create an AI website builder.