with 700 humans simulating being an AI

Currently the It is omnipresent In all technological areas and thousands of startups they are receiving millionaire investments of great technology and investment funds to develop it. The problem is that in some products that were announced as the latest technology promoted by AI, they actually had behind an army of poorly paid programmers who responded to users simulating to be a Chatbot of AI.

The Builder.AI scandal. CNBC published That the London Startup Builder.AI, who promised to revolutionize the creation of applications with artificial intelligence, was actually a great fraud that used 700 Indian programmers to simulate a so -called Natasha.

The company, which raised 445 million dollars and was supported by technological giants Like Microsoft and investment funds from Catar, assured that your No-code platformdriven by AI could build software based on modules, as if it were Lego pieces. However, the reality was very different and, after declaring himself in bankruptcy and the intervention of his creditors, it was discovered that behind that technological facade there was only one army of human programmers. Natural intelligence, non -artificial.

How Builder.AI acted. As explained by Bernhard Engelbrecht, founder of Ebern Finance In his X profileBuilder.AI was presented as the final solution to create applications No need to know how to program. According to their message, “in reality, customer requests were sent to the Indian office, where 700 Indians wrote code instead of AI.”

The idea of ​​programming based on blocks generated by AI is now quite common, but in 2018 it was a rather innovative idea. Above all, because the unbridled had not yet begun Race for AI which began with the launch of Chatgpt. This innovative proposal provided the startup large investments, and quickly reached an assessment of 1.5 billion dollars.

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Bankruptcy and the great discovery. The outcome came when Builder.AI breached the payment of a loan of 50 million dollars granted by Viola Credit in 2023. The creditor seized 37 million of the company’s accounts, which left Builder.AI without capacity to pay his employees or continue their operations.

When looking at his accounts, it was uncovered that the company had inflated its sales figures simulating business with the Indian firm see innovation, which, such and as he collected Bloomberggenerated accounting manipulation suspicions to appear a greater solvency of the real one. The company itself He admitted on LinkedIn that he was “working closely with the administrators” and thanked his staff and interested parties, recognizing that “the previous mistakes had led the company beyond recovery.”

The AI ​​did not give what it promised. Bluider’s main problem was not that after his Natasha there would be 700 human programmers. The problem, as Engelbrecht stood out in his message, was that his code did not work. The supposed AI generated applications plagued with errors and with illegible code. “The resulting applications were full of errors, they were dysfunctional and the code was illegible. Everything was like a real artificial intelligence, except that none of that was.”

Builder’s customers were found with applications that did not meet their expectations, and sales were progressively collapsing. Phil Brunkard, from Info-Tech Research Group, declared to Business Today That many companies in the sector grew too fast, without a solid financial base or truly innovative offers. Now, the fall of Builder.AI question the supervision of investors and the transparency of companies.

Chronicle of a scam announced. It cannot be said that it was the first time that the authenticity of Builder’s artificial intelligence was questioned. In 2019, The Wall Street Journal I had already published that the startup offered “human assisted” services, although reality was rather the other way around: humans assisted by AI.

Robert Holdheim, a former startup, demanded for 5 million dollars alleging that he was fired after complaining that Builder’s technology “did not work as promoted and was nothing more than a smoke curtain.”

Sachin Dev Duggal, CEO of Builder.AI, declared in the WSJ article that “about 60% on average of its reusable software is produced by machines and the rest is generated by humans for the development of applications.” The evidence has shown that this percentage of human contribution was much greater.

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Image | Wikimedia Commons (Web Summit)