241–250 of 283 posts
So.. where did the $450M go? A team of 700 developers in India built over eight years would have cost a fraction of that.
They have been operating since 2016. Companies can and have burned through $450M in funding a hell of a lot faster than that. OpenAI is on track to spend $14 billion this year.
Not to confuse with builder.IO - poor founder was posting these days "FOR THE LAST TIME GUYS THIS IS A DIFFERENT COMPANY".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Everyone talks about models and infrastructure, but without the right data, you've got nothing. And that's where the biggest hidden cost is.
According to the company's own website, they were creating the data themselves. Labelled datasets, transcripts, customer conversations, documents, and more. That's where the real money goes. Millions and millions.
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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.
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What about traditional auto manufacturers making claims about solid state battery technology they will achieve in the next decade that they haven't yet? There are always unsolved engineering and scientific challenges that stand between today and future product, and nothing is guaranteed, but you have to sell investors on the future technology (see: frontier model makers pushing AGI/ASI hype) Obviously there are diffe…
Why are so many people here pretending fraud is ambiguous? Saying "We will have great batteries 10 years from now" is not fraud. It's your belief about the future. Everyone knows no one can predict the future. Saying "this hydrogen powered truck works, here is a video of it running on the road right now" but the video is edited so you don't see that it's going down hill and the car isn't actually running" that's frau…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about traditional auto manufacturers making claims about solid state battery technology they will achieve in the next decade that they haven't yet? There are always unsolved engineering and scientific challenges that stand between today and future product, and nothing is guaranteed, but you have to sell investors on the future technology (see: frontier model makers pushing AGI/ASI hype) Obviously there are diffe…
Why are so many people here pretending fraud is ambiguous? Saying "We will have great batteries 10 years from now" is not fraud. It's your belief about the future. Everyone knows no one can predict the future. Saying "this hydrogen powered truck works, here is a video of it running on the road right now" but the video is edited so you don't see that it's going down hill and the car isn't actually running" that's frau…
Take a minute to visit their site and get informed. We live in a time where people form opinions just by reading a headline.
Two claims are being made here, one boring and one lurid. The boring claim is that the company inflated its sales through a round-tripping scheme: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-30/builder-a... ( https://archive.ph/1oyOw ). That's consistent with other recent reporting (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44080640 ) The lurid claim is that the company's AI product was actually "Indians pretendi…
There are personal testimonials in the indiandevelopers subreddit from quite a while ago, if those are to be believed.
I've seen a lot of posts coming out of India claiming "we were the AI". So I looked into it to see if Builder AI was lying, or if this was just a case of unpaid developers from India spreading rumours after the company went bust.
Here's what some of the devs are saying:
> "We were the AI. They hired 700 of us to build the apps"
Sounds shocking, but it doesn't hold up.
The problem is, BuilderAI never said development was done using AI. Quite the opposite. Their own website explains that a virtual assistant called "Natasha" assigns a human developer to your project. That developer then customises the code. They even use facial recognition to verify it's the same person doing the work.
> "Natasha recommends the best suited developer for your app project, who then customises your code on our virtual desktop. We also use facial recognition to check that the developer working on your code is the same one Natasha picked."
Source: https://www.builder.ai/how-it-works
I also checked the Wayback Machine. No changes were made to that site after the scandal. Which means: yes, those 700 developers were probably building apps, but no, they weren't "the AI". Because the company never claimed the apps were built by AI to begin with.
Verdict: FAKE NEWS
Two claims are being made here, one boring and one lurid. The boring claim is that the company inflated its sales through a round-tripping scheme: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-30/builder-a... ( https://archive.ph/1oyOw ). That's consistent with other recent reporting (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44080640 ) The lurid claim is that the company's AI product was actually "Indians pretendi…
Engineer.ai says its “human-assisted AI” allows anyone to create a mobile app by clicking through a menu on its website. Users can then choose existing apps similar to their idea, such as Uber’s or Facebook’s. Then Engineer.ai creates the app largely automatically, it says, making the process cheaper and quicker than conventional app development.
“We’ve built software and an AI called Natasha that allows anyone to build custom software like ordering pizza,” Engineer.ai founder Sachin Dev Duggal said in an onstage interview in India last year. Since much of the code underpinning popular apps is similar, the company’s “human-assisted AI” can help assemble new ones automatically, he said. Roughly 82% of an app the company had recently developed “was built autonomously, in the first hour” by Engineer.ai’s technology, Mr. Duggal said at the time.
Documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and several people familiar with the company’s operations, including current and former staff, suggest Engineer.ai doesn’t use AI to assemble code for apps as it claims. They indicated that the company relies on human engineers in India and elsewhere to do most of that work, and that its AI claims are inflated even in light of the fake-it-till-you-make-it mentality common among tech startups.
Original link (by nikcub):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-startup-boom-raises-question...
Arxiv:
Note the article is from 2019. "Engineer.ai" is the same company as "Builder.ai".
To summarise, my reading of the article is that the founder of Bulder.ai (at the time "Engineer.ai") promoted the company's technology as mostly AI, assisted by a few humans; and that WSJ saw documents suggesting otherwise.
dang, why do you say the claim is "lurid"? Is it because of the racist undertones of "Indians not AI"? That's fair, there's severe racism against Indian coders in the West, but scams and fraud absolutely happen and it is inevitable to be disgusted when they are revealed. There has to be a more balance stance than dismissing all fraud claims as "lurid".
Two claims are being made here, one boring and one lurid. The boring claim is that the company inflated its sales through a round-tripping scheme: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-30/builder-a... ( https://archive.ph/1oyOw ). That's consistent with other recent reporting (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44080640 ) The lurid claim is that the company's AI product was actually "Indians pretendi…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D36ZmJRYGK8
Engineers in the dev office say that's false and "Natasha" was a running joke in the office:
https://techfundingnews.com/fake-it-till-you-unicorn-builder...