AI unicorn exposed as a scam

Builder.ai has received funding from several big tech companies, including Microsoft. Photo: FT .

According to the Financial Times , Builder.ai has informed its employees that it is filing for bankruptcy due to financial difficulties. The unicorn once boasted of being able to "create apps" using AI. In reality, it relied entirely on human code. The incident was met with public ridicule, with many mocking its artificial intelligence, not its inherent intelligence.

Builder.ai, founded with the slogan of enabling everyone to develop applications using AI, attracted interest from Microsoft, the Qatari Government Foundation, and numerous venture capital firms. They have raised over $500 million in total.

However, the Wall Street Journal, starting in 2019, exposed that much of the source code was handwritten by engineers rather than created by AI. It subsequently changed its name to Builder.ai and gradually acknowledged the level of human involvement in its products.

Ultimately, the business succumbed to financial difficulties. In February, Builder.ai founder Sachin Dev Duggal resigned and handed over the reins to new CEO Manpreet Ratia. The organization praised Ratia for revolutionizing software development with the help of AI. However, less than three months later, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Ratia stated that Builder.ai is beyond recovery due to past missteps. The unicorn owes tens of millions of dollars in overdue debt, leading to asset freezes.

The CEO attempted to run the company with " zero USD " in bank accounts in the UK and the US. Ratia added that he tried to transfer the remaining funds in his Singapore bank account to pay employee salaries, but creditors seized all of them as well.

Builder.ai was once considered a beacon of innovation in the development of generative AI software. In reality, it proved that the artificial intelligence label couldn't mask the organization's weaknesses.

This event also once again prompted the industry to reflect on the practical application value of AI. On Reddit, a post titled "My new hobby: Watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees crazy" received a large amount of engagement.

It targeted GitHub Copilot (Microsoft's program creation tool), which frequently encountered errors in practical use. Ultimately, programmers had to manually fix them.

"Spending that much time teaching a large language model how to write programs is absurd and frustrating," one person commented on GitHub's .NET project page.

Last month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proudly announced that 30% of the source code for some libraries was written by AI. However, according to the practical experience of seasoned programmers, AI assistants still cannot independently handle complex tasks that are difficult to replace engineers.

Source: https://znews.vn/ky-lan-ai-bi-vach-tran-lua-dao-post1556395.html