Mastodawn

That story about an AI startup collapsing after it turned out to be 700 Indian developers in a Trenchcoat? It was a made up story by a crypto guy that became clickbait, published unchecked by tech media everywhere. Read the real story behind Builder.ai here: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/builder-ai-did-not-fake-ai/

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Builder.ai did not “fake AI with 700 engineers”

The claim that the AI startup “faked AI” with hundreds of engineers went viral – and I also fell for it, initially. The reality is much more sobering: Builder.ai built a code generator on top of Claude and other LLMs; it did not build a so-called “Mechanical Turk.”

The Pragmatic Engineer

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Jan Wildeboer 😷

1d ago

The part in the real story about developers that worked hard at builder.ai, lost their job and now fear they might have a stain on their career because a crypto guy went viral with a made up story is kinda our modern times in a nutshell.

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Jan Wildeboer 😷

1d ago

But it also exemplifies the ego-driven hubris of a startup with too much VC (Venture Capital) paved runway that led them to waste time, money and resources on reinventing many wheels. It’s a very good blog post, IMHO.

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udo m. rader ☕ 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 🐧1d ago

@jwildeboer I'm not sure if all this "reinventing the wheels" really happened without (good) intentions. If what is described in the blog post was indeed their architecture, then it was quite innovative, IMHO. Such an approach could actually work.

Maybe their "reinventing the wheels" was just an attempt to test their own tool, their own architecture. There's nothing wrong with being one of your own customers so that you can identify weaknesses early on.

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Jan Wildeboer 😷

1d ago

@riaschissl Well, it didn’t work. So there’s that. Edit: I was looking at this part for the „reinventing the wheel“.

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Nemo 1d ago

@jwildeboer
See, and this, right there, is why ultimately, I have no sympathy.

What is this bullshit? what value is being created? What engineer was blind enough to not immediately yuck out of something like that?

Do you imagine the good you could do to the world with 10% of the resources invested in open source?
@riaschissl

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Tris 1d ago

@jwildeboer Interesting, there was also https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-powered-store-checkout-which-needed-1000-video-reviewers/ xD

Amazon Fresh kills “Just Walk Out” shopping tech—it never really worked

“AI” checkout was actually powered by 1,000 human video reviewers in India.

Ars Technica

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mag 1d ago

@jwildeboer This article doesn't convince me that the claim is made-up. It doesn't mention what the "external development network" did, nor how it was advertised to potential clients.

I also disagree with the article's claim that GPT and co. produced high-quality code in 2024: it's still an ongoing argument whether that's true today, let alone last year.

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Ash_Crow 1d ago

@jwildeboer "The idea was that by taking on thousands of projects, the team behind Natasha could create reusable building blocks that speed up building websites and mobile apps."

So... Like the existing web frameworks already do?