Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?

Why don't they contact the Head of AI, Craig Saunders (ex-Director of Amazon AI), and ask him directly. This was never done, which raises serious doubts about the credibility of the person who wrote it.

We need to stick to the facts, especially now that pseudo-journalists are flooding the web with fake news.

Let's keep this site reliable, please.

I read their site and blog, and they have a lot of screenshots of their internal apps.

Here's the dashboard where you choose an app: https://www.builder.ai/images/Choose.jpg

And here's the project progress dashboard showing how long it takes to build. In this case, it's 7 months. Clearly, there's no GenAI involved if it takes that long:

https://www.builder.ai/images/builder-studio-project-progres...

They also show in the menu things like "Releases" and "Meet the squad" (I'm assuming the devs). It can't be fake! One of them shows templates of well known sites. Based on what I read, you choose a template, Natasha or something else handles the assembly, which I assume is just a fancy way of saying it checks out a repo and installs dependencies. Then the Indian programmers do the rest. This is clearly explained on their website.

Take a look at their blog. There's plenty of information about their apps, which were reviewed by Microsoft before they invested 250 million.

Verdict: FAKE NEWS

In 2019 its former Chief Business Officer sued them for fraud, claiming that apps were built by Indian developers despite the claim that it was "80%" done by AI. There were detailed articles in the Wall Street Journal and The Verge at the time. I've found one reference saying it was settled out of court (the Telegraph), though I thought I'd previously read the case was dismissed.

When I was there 3 years later:

- the company had been renamed from Engineer.ai to Builder.ai

- the marketing materials still heavily pushed the claim that apps were 80% built by AI, curiously the exact same figure as it had been 3 years earlier

- there was a bunch of automation around small parts of the software development process. When customers went to create a new project there was an AI chatbot assistant (Natasha), which amongst other things asked the customer for their requirements, and created some estimates for how long things would take. There was also some automation for turning UI mockups into CSS styles and then merging the styles with templated React components. These various small bits of automation did have teams of real engineers working on it in the UK and the US. However, by and large it didn't really work. It seemed to me that the Indian outsourced programmers working on client projects totally ignored this technology anyway, and just went about their jobs as though it didn't exist. Despite being employed to work on this tech, I never had any interaction with the Indian developers building real client projects.

- a new team was spun up to use Generative AI to create frontend mock ups of an application from template components. This was integrated into the flow when potential clients were chatting with the Natasha AI chatbot. Some people worked genuinely hard on this project, and to some extent it did function. However, it didn't do much beyond the many other "create a frontend mockup from a single prompt" projects out there, other than having access to the company's internal React component templates. As far as I'm aware these frontend mockups were never used by the Indian developers who built the final projects.

In the tech world there is a very wide blurred zone between "outright fraud, which leads to a conviction in court" and "exagerrated claims". Given the extent to which Builder.ai committed literal fraud with their revenue figures and accounting, and given the hundreds of millions of dollars they raised on very limited real sales, I believe their claims about AI could plausibly also be literal fraud. However, the standards of a court case are much higher than my personal use of the word "fraud". I'm tempted to believe Musk is also bordering on fraud with e.g. the Boring Company, or his repeated claims about how close Tesla is to fully automated self-driving robo taxis. But given Tesla is building a genuine product with genuinely high sales and revenue, and given how much other crazy stuff Musk does that makes these exagerrated claims pale in comparison, it's not something that's ever going to lead to a court case.

The issue here is that many people think AI only means LLMs, Transformers, or GenAI. But AI has been around for decades and includes machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks.

So anyone using ML is free to register a .ai domain. There’s nothing wrong with that.

The problem would be if you told customers that your virtual assistant, in this case "Natasha", was creating the code instead of humans.

But that's not what happened here. The company went broke because it was reporting false sales figures.