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This is fake news. Builder.ai, like any other dev shop, had clients and was building apps using developers in India, pretty much like Infosys or any other India

by pyman 1y ago

This is fake news. Builder.ai, like any other dev shop, had clients and was building apps using developers in India, pretty much like Infosys or any other Indian dev shop. Nothing wrong with that. From what I read online, the real issue was "Natasha", their virtual assistant powered by a dedicated foundation model. They ran out of money before it got anywhere.

bartread 1y ago
> This is fake news. Builder.ai, like any other dev shop, had clients and was building apps using developers in India, pretty much like Infosys or any other Indian dev shop. Nothing wrong with that. Yeeeah... that's a fairly disingenuous take. The difference between every other offshore dev shop backed by developers in India and Builder.ai is that - and I say this as someone who thinks Infosys is a shit company - Infosys and all those other dev shops are at least up front about how their business works and where and who will be building your app. Whereas Builder.ai spent quite a long time pretending like they had AI doing the work when actually it was a lot of devs in India. That is deliberately misleading and it is not OK. It's fraudulent. It's literally what Theranos did with their Edison machines that never worked so whereas they claimed they had this wondrous new blood testing technology they were actually running tests with Siemens machines, diluting blood samples, etc. The consequences of Theranos's actions were much more serious (misdiagnoses and, indeed missed diagnoses of thousands of patients), rather than just apps built by humans rather than AI, but lying and fraud is lying and fraud.
- pyman 1y ago
  I don't agree. Even Infosys markets AI as part of their offering, just look at their "AI for Infrastructure" pitch: https://www.infosys.com/services/cloud-cobalt/offerings/ai-infrastructure.html https://www.infosys.com/services/cloud-cobalt/offerings/ai-i... Every big dev shop does this. Overselling tech happens all the time in this space. The line between marketing and misleading isn't always so clear. The difference is Builder.ai pushed the AI angle harder, but that doesn't make it Theranos-level fraud.
  - mistercheph 1y ago
    Arguably, Theranos was also somewhere in a gray area between marketing and fraud. Everyone in the industry incentivizes and participates in this behavior, but once in a while, let's grab a few stand-out individuals to scapegoat once in a while for all the harm caused by/to the entire group with this behavior. Make sure you pick someone big/ugly enough to be credibly dangerous to the whole group, but who isn't too dangerous and well connected so that you can be sure that when the card flips on them everyone around them scatters. It's the same reason groups of individual humans do it: Scapegoating is a much lower resistance path to follow than the horrifying alternative (self-consciousness, reflection, love)
    - pyman 1y ago
      Theranos was dealing with people's health. Misdiagnoses, delayed treatments, etc, that's real harm. Imo, comparing that to building web apps isn't the same.
      - Retric 1y ago
        Theranos was using the same testing equipment and techniques as any other lab for most of their diagnostic services. Which is how they avoided being instantly exposed when their results ended up being meaningless. “In October 2015, John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal reported that Theranos was using traditional blood testing machines instead of the company's Edison devices to run its tests, and that the company's Edison machines might provide inaccurate results.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos They did plenty of shady shit including producing poor results, but that’s largely incompetence independent of fraud vs intentionally putting people’s lives on the line. IMO, the fraud kind of hides the equally important story where incompetent 19 year old collage dropout shockingly doesn’t know how to effectively setup and manage complex systems.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - 1y ago
- osigurdson 1y ago
  It doesn't matter for customers but investors would be interested if AI is being used or a bunch of devs due to the scaling potential differences.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
profsummergig 1y ago
This is so obviously fake news that it's a good litmus test of the people who are boosting it. There's no way that a team of programmers can ever produce code quickly enough to mimic anything close to the response time of a coding LLM.
- threeseed 1y ago
  But it’s not just about coding quickly but also correctly. Coding LLMs do not solve the problem of it hallucinating, using antiquated libraries and technologies and screwing up large code bases because of the limited context size. Given a well architected component library and set of modules I would bet that on average I could build a correct website faster.
  - pyman 1y ago
    I did a bit of research… Builder.ai didn't tell investors they were competing with GitHub Copilot, Cody, or CodeWhisperer. Those are code assistants for developers. They told investors they were building a virtual assistant for customers. This assistant was meant to "talk" to clients, gather requirements and automate parts of the build process. Very different space. And like I said in another comment, creating a dedicated, pre-trained foundation model is expensive. Not to mention a full LLM. Questions: 1. Did Craig Saunders, the VP of AI (and ex-Amazon), ever show investors or clients any working demo of Natasha? Or a product roadmap? 2. Was there a technical team behind Saunders capable of building such a model? 3. Was the goal really to build a domain-specific foundation model, or was that just a narrative to attract investment?
    - daveguy 1y ago
      > creating a dedicated, pre-trained foundation model is expensive. Not to mention a full LLM. Creating a dedicated pretrained model is a prerequisite of any LLM. What do you mean by "full LLM"?
      - pyman 1y ago
tennseven 1y ago
No, the "real issue" is that Builder.ai was swapping money with a friendly firm to fraudulently inflate sales. You and everyone else claiming "fake news" on this thing are completely clueless, as evidenced by the fact that the company has filed for bankruptcy.

by pyman 1y ago

bartread 1y ago

> This is fake news. Builder.ai, like any other dev shop, had clients and was building apps using developers in India, pretty much like Infosys or any other Indian dev shop. Nothing wrong with that. Yeeeah... that's a fairly disingenuous take. The difference between every other offshore dev shop backed by developers in India and Builder.ai is that - and I say this as someone who thinks Infosys is a shit company - Infosys and all those other dev shops are at least up front about how their business works and where and who will be building your app. Whereas Builder.ai spent quite a long time pretending like they had AI doing the work when actually it was a lot of devs in India. That is deliberately misleading and it is not OK. It's fraudulent. It's literally what Theranos did with their Edison machines that never worked so whereas they claimed they had this wondrous new blood testing technology they were actually running tests with Siemens machines, diluting blood samples, etc. The consequences of Theranos's actions were much more serious (misdiagnoses and, indeed missed diagnoses of thousands of patients), rather than just apps built by humans rather than AI, but lying and fraud is lying and fraud.

pyman 1y ago
I don't agree. Even Infosys markets AI as part of their offering, just look at their "AI for Infrastructure" pitch: https://www.infosys.com/services/cloud-cobalt/offerings/ai-infrastructure.html https://www.infosys.com/services/cloud-cobalt/offerings/ai-i... Every big dev shop does this. Overselling tech happens all the time in this space. The line between marketing and misleading isn't always so clear. The difference is Builder.ai pushed the AI angle harder, but that doesn't make it Theranos-level fraud.
- mistercheph 1y ago
  Arguably, Theranos was also somewhere in a gray area between marketing and fraud. Everyone in the industry incentivizes and participates in this behavior, but once in a while, let's grab a few stand-out individuals to scapegoat once in a while for all the harm caused by/to the entire group with this behavior. Make sure you pick someone big/ugly enough to be credibly dangerous to the whole group, but who isn't too dangerous and well connected so that you can be sure that when the card flips on them everyone around them scatters. It's the same reason groups of individual humans do it: Scapegoating is a much lower resistance path to follow than the horrifying alternative (self-consciousness, reflection, love)
  - pyman 1y ago
    Theranos was dealing with people's health. Misdiagnoses, delayed treatments, etc, that's real harm. Imo, comparing that to building web apps isn't the same.
    - Retric 1y ago
      Theranos was using the same testing equipment and techniques as any other lab for most of their diagnostic services. Which is how they avoided being instantly exposed when their results ended up being meaningless. “In October 2015, John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal reported that Theranos was using traditional blood testing machines instead of the company's Edison devices to run its tests, and that the company's Edison machines might provide inaccurate results.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos They did plenty of shady shit including producing poor results, but that’s largely incompetence independent of fraud vs intentionally putting people’s lives on the line. IMO, the fraud kind of hides the equally important story where incompetent 19 year old collage dropout shockingly doesn’t know how to effectively setup and manage complex systems.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - 1y ago
osigurdson 1y ago
It doesn't matter for customers but investors would be interested if AI is being used or a bunch of devs due to the scaling potential differences.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

profsummergig 1y ago

This is so obviously fake news that it's a good litmus test of the people who are boosting it. There's no way that a team of programmers can ever produce code quickly enough to mimic anything close to the response time of a coding LLM.

threeseed 1y ago
But it’s not just about coding quickly but also correctly. Coding LLMs do not solve the problem of it hallucinating, using antiquated libraries and technologies and screwing up large code bases because of the limited context size. Given a well architected component library and set of modules I would bet that on average I could build a correct website faster.
- pyman 1y ago
  I did a bit of research… Builder.ai didn't tell investors they were competing with GitHub Copilot, Cody, or CodeWhisperer. Those are code assistants for developers. They told investors they were building a virtual assistant for customers. This assistant was meant to "talk" to clients, gather requirements and automate parts of the build process. Very different space. And like I said in another comment, creating a dedicated, pre-trained foundation model is expensive. Not to mention a full LLM. Questions: 1. Did Craig Saunders, the VP of AI (and ex-Amazon), ever show investors or clients any working demo of Natasha? Or a product roadmap? 2. Was there a technical team behind Saunders capable of building such a model? 3. Was the goal really to build a domain-specific foundation model, or was that just a narrative to attract investment?
  - daveguy 1y ago
    > creating a dedicated, pre-trained foundation model is expensive. Not to mention a full LLM. Creating a dedicated pretrained model is a prerequisite of any LLM. What do you mean by "full LLM"?
    - pyman 1y ago

tennseven 1y ago

No, the "real issue" is that Builder.ai was swapping money with a friendly firm to fraudulently inflate sales. You and everyone else claiming "fake news" on this thing are completely clueless, as evidenced by the fact that the company has filed for bankruptcy.