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

ibtimes.co.uk

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

#111

Post by [deleted] »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #83
pyman wrote: post #71

Earlier 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…

...and given the massive success of Amazon Alexa...

[deleted]

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

#112

Post by Gothmog69 »

tacheiordache wrote: post #74
pyman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240611122778/en/Bui...

You say that as if Amazon Alexa was some kind of amazing product. t succeeded because it has Amazon backing and it's kindof a crappy product.

What makes it crappy? I find it really good at voice detection

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

#113

Post by calmbell »

pyman wrote: post #106
RollingRo11 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being 13 years old and stepping into an Amazon Go store in Seattle. Little me lost my mind. I think I walked in and out of the store like 5 times just to see the amazon charge. Sucks that half of the magic was a lie. Shame to see another project fall to the strategy of AI = "actually indians". I wonder how many other companies have engaged in this stuff.

See: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240611122778/en/Bui...

Depends on how you define real. I would argue that GPT-2 was a real LLM and it almost certainly cost a lot less than a billion. I'm sure there are much better examples.

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

#114

Post by jampekka »

burnte wrote: post #46
jampekka wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every problem people blame on "capitalism" is solvable with appropriate regulation. Capitalism makes capitalism hard to appropriately regulate. Concentration of capital means concentration of power.

> Capitalism makes capitalism hard to appropriately regulate. Concentration of capital means concentration of power. And yet many countries have a better handle on it than the USA. I just never, ever buy into the whole "it's to hard for America to do a thing that other countries do". I think the US is capable of anything we put our collective will towards, we just need leaders who want to lead the whole nation rather…

The general trend has been towards deregulation, and capital concentration, almost everywhere for decades. US is just ahead.

The talk in EU is now that we have to ease regulation because we can't compete with countries with laxer regulation. The same race to the bottom has happened in e.g. taxes and labor protections ever since capital controls were lifted.

> I think the US is capable of anything we put our collective will towards, we just need leaders who want to lead the whole nation rather than personal profiteers.

I sure hope so but I can't really see it happening. The whole US political system seems to be FUBAR, largely because the concentrations of capital bought it.

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

#115

Post by spwa4 »

Aurornis wrote: post #94
MangoToupe wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a good deal of grey-area there, for instance in faking user activity in social media startups. Reddit did this for instance, although I don't know if they reported active user numbers as part of fundraising.

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?

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

#116

Post by sokoloff »

oblio wrote: post #98
tacheiordache wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that as if Amazon Alexa was some kind of amazing product. t succeeded because it has Amazon backing and it's kindof a crappy product.

All voice assistants, at least the original iterations, are only good for 3-4 trivial things people actually want. And they've been around for a decade at this point.

It’s a kitchen timer, music player, and weather sayer.

That’s surely worth the $30 I paid.

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

#117

Post by bluefirebrand »

blitzar wrote: post #90
andrewinardeer wrote: post #18

AI = Actual Indians, apparently.

Whats the process for hallucinations? Do 1 in 10 of each of the workers have to be tripping on shrooms all shift?

No they're just extremely low paid overseas workers scrambling to do work fast enough that it looks like "AI"?

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

#119

Post by DebtDeflation »

andrewinardeer wrote: post #18

AI = Actual Indians, apparently.

It's happening in every industry. CEOs moving back office jobs to India and telling Wall St they replaced the jobs with "AI" to get a stock price boost. I'm convinced this dynamic is a major cause of the "white collar recession" we're experiencing now. Perhaps the intent is to eventually replace the Indians with AI (Artificial Intelligence), but right now it's very much AI (Anonymous Indians) doing the work.
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