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Builder.ai did not "fake AI with 700 engineers"
- cratermoon 1y agoUnnamed former employees of a dead company say company didn't fake it. Film at 11.
- alephnerd 1y agoI tend to trust Gergely Orosz (the writer of Pragmatic Engineer). He validate sources and has a good track record on reporting on the European tech scene and Engineering Management. His blog and newsletter are both fairly popular on HN.
- senko 1y agoThis was analyzed on HN a week or so ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44176241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44176241 The "700 engineers faking AI" claim seems to have been sloppy[0] reasoning by an influencer, which spread like wildfire. [0] I won't attribute malice here, but this version was certainly more interesting than the truth
- mediaman 1y agoThe original story doesn't make any sense. How would you fake an "AI" agent coding by using people on the other side? Woudn't it be...obvious? People cannot type code that fast. What's your non-snarky theory about how this could possibly be true?
- wnevets 1y agoAre there people who actually believe that a user would enter a text prompt than a human programmer would generate the code?
- tomasphan 1y agoYes, 90% of people with no tech background reading the news
- pyman 1y agoThey don't know the difference between AI and ChatGPT
- TiredOfLife 1y agoMajority of HN commenters
- apwell23 1y agothat was not the flow
- wnevets 1y agoBut it was the flow in the examples.
- dd_xplore 1y agoUnfortunately a lot of people!!
- hluska 1y agoBuilder.ai had a totally different flow, but yeah, when boring stories and exciting ones compete to tell the same story, a very large percentage will run with the exciting story. It’s like death tax in US political history - the US has never had a death tax but it’s way more exciting to call it a death tax than an estate tax. Only now, instead of media being the primary disseminator of spin, we have people sharing exciting stories on social media instead of boring stories about building internal zoom and accounting issues. Then social animals kick in, likes pour in and more people share. Social media has created a world where an exciting lie can drown out boring truth for a large percentage of people.
- mellosouls 1y agoKudos to the author for the update - and also to others including @dang for calling it out at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169759 (Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?, 367 points, 267 comments)
- pyman 1y agoHey, I did some digging too (cough cough). Here's what I said on that thread: - Proven: BuilderAI collapsed after fabricating revenue. - Unsubstantiated: The rumour that 700 devs were the chatbot is false, not backed by evidence or insiders. - Marketing vs. reality: They marketed features as "AI-assisted", not AI-generated, two very different things. - Bottom line: The real scandal is financial fraud, not some fake-AI front.
- mellosouls 1y agoYeah, nice work - I mentioned "and others" for that reason; dangs was just the top comment.
- tomasphan 1y agoI don’t believe that their business entirely depended on 700 actual humans, just as much as I don’t believe that to be true for the Amazon store. However, both probably relied on humans in the loop which is not sustainable at scale.
- fragmede 1y agoat what scale though? as long as money line go up faster than cost line go up, it's fine?
- tomasphan 1y agoNo, it’s not sustainable at any scale.
- Legend2440 1y agoIf you read the article, they had two separate products: one of which was 700 actual humans, and the other was an LLM-powered coding tool.
- gamblor956 1y agoLLMs are all fake AI. As the recently released Apple study demonstrates, LLMs don't reason, they just pattern match. That's not "intelligence" however you define it because they can only solve things that are already within their training set. In this case, it would have been better for the AI industry if it had been 700 programmers, because then the rest of the industry could have argued that the utter trash code Builder.ai generated was the result of human coders spending a few minutes haphazardly typing out random code, and not the result of a specialty-trained LLM.
- aeve890 1y ago>As the recently released Apple study demonstrates, LLMs don't reason, they just pattern match Hold on a minute I was under the impression that "reasoning" was just marketing buzzword the same as "hallucinations", because how tf anyone expected GPUs to "reason" and "hallucinate" when even neurology/psychology don't have a strict definition of those processes.
- jacobr1 1y agoNo, the definitions are very much up for debate, but there is an actual process here. "Reasoning" in this case means having the model not just produce whatever output is requested directly, but also spend some time writing out its thoughts about how to produce that output. Early version of this were just prompt engineering where you ask the model to produce its "chain of thought" or "work step by step" on how to approach the problem. Later this was trained into the model directly with traces on this intermediate thinking, especially for multistep problems, without the need for explicit prompting. And then architecturally these models now have different ways to determine when to stop "reasoning" to skip to generating actual output. I don't have a strict enough definition to debate if this reasoning is "real" - but from personal experience it certainly appears to be performing something that at least "looks" like inductive thought, and leads to better answers than prior model generations without reasoning/thinking enabled.
- codr7 1y agoReasoning means what reasoning always meant. Selling an algorithm that can write a list of steps as reasoning is bordering on fraud. It's not uncommon that they guess the right solution, and then "reason" their way out of it.
- alerter 1y ago> Builder hired 300 internal engineers and kicked off building internal tools, all of which could have simply been purchased Tempted to say there was a bit of corruption here, crazy decision. Like someone had connections to the contractor providing all those devs. otoh they were an "app builder" company. Maybe they really wanted to dogfood.
- alephnerd 1y agoA similar thing happened at Uber before the 2021 re-org. At one point they had 3 competing internal chat apps from what I've heard from peers working there, and having previously worked for a vendor of Uber's, I noticed a significant amount of disjointedness in their environment (seemed very disjointed EM driven with no overarching product vision). Ofc, Gergely might have some thoughts about that ;)
- Inviz 1y agoOne good thing that came out of that disjointedness is temporal.io, which is an ultimate microservice gluecode tool
- pyman 1y agoHmm, this is the reasoning of a kid: "You hire devs instead of using AI, therefore you are corrupt". More conspiracy theories. Based on what the article says, it was a dev shop like Infosys or any other Indian dev company, they were working on hundreds of projects.
- quantadev 1y agoI always knew this story was fake. Even if you have a trillion expert developers it would still be impossible to get fast enough answers to "Fake an LLM". Humans obviously aren't _parallelizable_ like that.
- pinoy420 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- weare138 1y agoThe accusation I heard was these developers they hired were essentially prompt wrangling behind the scenes using other AI services to make Builder seem better than it really was.
- quantadev 1y agoI just saw the click-bait garbage headline, and from that alone I knew it was a lie, so I never even clicked it to read any articles.
- firesteelrain 1y ago“ building internal versions of Slack, Zoom, JIRA, and more…” Did they really do this or customize Jira schemas and workflows for example ?
- Fraterkes 1y agoThe headline as stated is categorically false, buuuut... I think it's pretty salient that a company called "Builder.ai" only had 15 engineers working on actual ai and actually mostly functioned as an outsourcing intermediary for 500-1000 engineers (ie, the builders). When it comes to these viral misunderstandings, you kind of reap what you sow.
- pyman 1y agoThe AI engineers were based in the UK and from what I've seen on LinkedIn many came from top unis. They're probably worth a 100x more than the builders. Not to mention their boss, who was a well know AI figure = $$$
- poisonwomb 1y agoIs ‘misunderstanding’ silicon valley slang for ‘scam’ or ‘securities fraud’?
- the__alchemist 1y agoWe can also use the more general word "lie". It's not a taboo; use it when appropriate!
- tempodox 1y agoYes.
- stego-tech 1y ago> Builder hired 300 internal engineers and kicked off building internal tools, all of which could have simply been purchased Dear god, PLEASE hire an actual Enterprise IT professional early in your startup expansion phase. A single competent EIT person (or dinosaur like me) could have - if this story is true - possibly saved the whole startup by understanding what’s immediately needed versus what’s nice-to-have, what should be self-hosted versus what should be XaaS, stitching everything together to reduce silos, and ensuring every cent is not just accounted for but wisely invested in future success. Even if the rest of your startup isn’t “worrying about the money”, your IT and Finance people should always be worried about the money.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tanelpoder 1y agoPerhaps the grand vision was to later use all those newly built internal tools as reusable components in their customer-facing apps…
- rcxdude 1y agoYeah, I feel like if their goal was to make custom software cheap and easy, this was basically just dogfooding.
- pyman 1y agoI would assume they were collecting data. If you're building a chatbot to talk to clients, you need all the transcripts from meetings, chat logs, project info, analytics, metrics, and so on. It's the only way to train your model properly. Do they have any patents related to using chatbots for project management?
- kumarm 1y agoMost likely. But that's exactly what someone who hasn't experienced enough cycles in industry would come up with :).
- thru47fhbghb 1y agoThe deep seated hate for Indians (and among them, Hindus) had been going on unchecked in the West for many hundred years. That's precisely why such fake-news go viral so quickly. Hell, when the woke "bleeding-heart" academics are the leading voices behind this hate festival, you know there's something deeply wrong. I was so shocked by the things "South-Asia depts." do in the US that it's hard not to to consider them to be in the same bag as the medieval religious nuts, pagan-hunting padre "saints" & "race-science pioneers".
- sandcat_ 1y agoI interviewed there a few years back. I bailed on the interview within the first fifteen minutes, the first time I’ve ever done that. I told them they’d given me the ick — not my most professional moment, admittedly! But it was an awkward and unpleasant interview. They spent the first ten minutes of the call predicting the death of software engineering (this was a software engineering interview) and complaining about expensive devs (ahem). I wouldn’t have minded so much if the only demo apps they had on their website weren’t some of the worst, non-native iOS apps I’ve ever seen. Truly awful. A month or two later I noticed on LinkedIn that a dodgy CTO I’d worked with, who had attempted to avoid paying me (and did avoid paying several colleagues of mine), had joined there too. It felt like a good fit. Yeah, I have to say, none of this is a surprise to me.
- pyman 1y ago[flagged]
- einsteinx2 1y agoOr they just typed it on an Apple device…
- dchest 1y agoProper typography ≠ AI generated, this meme needs to stop. Feel free to stop reading anything with emdashes, but don’t accuse people of being AI for this reason. (Also, ChatGPT usually uses emdashes without spaces.)
- joshstrange 1y agoI don’t find this article particularly convincing. The main argument seems to be “It couldn’t be real engineers, it would be too slow” but I have no clue what the Builder.ai interface or response times were like. Also it says 10-20min would be too long… kind of? Not really though? Depends on the output. Claude Code has run for quite a while on its own before (I’ve never timed it) but 5-10+min doesn’t shock me. Yes, Claude is giving real-time output but I’ve seen a number of dev tools that don’t (or didn’t, this area is moving fast). Also, re: hiring outsourced contractors > However, we didn't anticipate the significant fraud that would ensue First time? Every experience I have personally had with outsourced contractors has been horrible. Bad code quality, high billing hours for low output, language and time barriers, the list goes on. I’m quick to flip the bozo bit on anyone pushing for outsourcing, engineers are not just cogs in a machine to start with and outsourced contractors are almost less useful than current LLM coding tools IMHO. If you already have to explain things in excruciating detail, you might as well talk to an LLM. People really want this black box that they can feed money and input into and have full-fledged applications and platforms pop out the other side. It doesn’t exist. I have only seen failures with outsourcing on this front and so far LLMs haven’t been able to do it either. Don’t get me wrong LLM’s are actually useful in my opinion, just not for writing all the code unsupervised or “vibe coding”.
- pyman 1y agoIt's common sense: you either believe what you read on Bernhard Engelbrecht's Twitter account (this is the same crypto influencer who scammed startup founders out of thousands of dollars) or you trust what's published on The Pragmatic Engineer blog, who actually read Bernhard's tweet and spoke to the people who built the tech. > I don't find this article particularly convincing I think you missed the point of the article. It's saying: this is what the conspiracy theorists want me to believe but it doesn't add up, so I'm going to pick up the phone and call the people who built it. At that point, it's engineers talking to engineers. And the post is the outcome of that conversation.
- troysk 1y agoThe post seems like a paid job as Engineer.ai rebranded to Builder.ai when they were accused of faking AI https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-features/sachin-duggal-speaks-on-why-he-rebranded-his-software-automation-startup-engineer-ai-to-builder-ai/ https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-features/sachin-duggal-spea... https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-startup-boom-raises-questions-of-exaggerated-tech-savvy-11565775004 https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-startup-boom-raises-question... https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/25/engineer-ai-launches-its-builder-now-platform-for-rapid-app-prototyping-and-building/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/25/engineer-ai-launches-its-b...