Unicorn exposed for using human coders, advertising as AI-generated

The collapse of a prominent AI start-up amid financial difficulties shows that the tech industry is overly optimistic about the applications of artificial intelligence.

Builder.ai has received funding from many big-techs, including Microsoft. Photo: FT .

Builder.ai has told employees it is filing for bankruptcy due to financial distress, according to the Financial Times . The unicorn once claimed to be able to “create apps” with AI. In reality, it relies entirely on human coders. The incident has been widely mocked as being artificial, not intelligent.

Builder.ai, founded with the slogan of enabling anyone to develop applications using AI, attracted interest from Microsoft, the Qatar Government Foundation and many venture capital organizations. The total amount of capital they raised exceeded 500 million USD .

However, the Wall Street Journal in 2019 exposed that most of the source code was handwritten by engineers and not generated by AI. It later changed its name to Builder.ai and gradually acknowledged the level of human involvement in its products.

Ultimately, the company was left in financial trouble. In February, Builder.ai founder Sachin Dev Duggal stepped down and was replaced by new CEO Manpreet Ratia. The organization praised Ratia for changing the way software is written with the help of AI. However, less than three months later, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Ratia said Builder.ai was unable to recover due to past bad decisions. The unicorn owed tens of millions of dollars in arrears, leading to the asset freeze.

The CEO tried to run the company with " 0 USD " in bank accounts in the UK and the US. Ratia added that he tried to transfer the remaining money in his Singapore bank account to pay his employees, but the creditors also seized it all.

Builder.ai was once considered an innovator in generative AI software development. In fact, it proves that the AI label cannot mask organizational incompetence.

The event also once again made the industry ponder the practical application value of AI. On Reddit, a post titled "My new hobby: Watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees crazy" received a lot of interactions.

It targets GitHub Copilot (Microsoft's program creation tool), which frequently crashes in real-world use, forcing developers to fumble around and fix it manually.

“Spending so much time teaching a large language model how to write programs is ridiculous and frustrating,” one commenter wrote on GitHub’s .NET project page.

Last month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proudly announced that 30% of the source code of some libraries was written by AI. But according to the practical experience of long-time programmers, AI assistants still cannot independently take on complex tasks that are difficult to replace engineers.

Source: https://znews.vn/ky-lan-bi-vach-tran-dung-nguoi-viet-code-quang-cao-la-ai-tao-post1556395.html