Builder AI was a Scam

Imagine a company that's worth 1.2 billion dollars, with governments giving them money, and even Microsoft throwing in 50 million dollars in VC funding. Yet somehow, it was an elaborate scam. Their "promise" was that they had an AI code generator. Their reality was that they had 50+ Indian junior software developers manually creating the code, hidden in some basement in India somewhere. Welcome to Builder AI, the biggest AI scam in history (so far)

Builder AI was a company that apparently allowed you to use AI to generate code. The only problem was that there was no AI, only a room full of underpaid Indian software developers, manually creating code to solve your "prompt". They operated like this for years, throwing 200 million dollars down the toilet, while lying to customers and investors through their teeth. On the surface it seemed like the most interesting "AI company" in the world, in reality it was all just an elaborate scam.

Ignoring the fact that it's probably a violation of the US Security Act from 1933, and the founder in theory risks 25 years in prison now, the story tells volumes about the state of the AI industry today. Facts are, and this is coming from somebody working with AI, 90% of all "AI startups" are either elaborate scams, oversold hype, or (sometimes) flat out pyramid schemes. And it's even worse than that, because also mature companies such as Amazon have been doing similar things, where they have an "AI system" that allowed you to simply walk into a store, put items in your pockets, and walk out, while being automatically deducted for what you had bought. Our industry is full of scams like these, and it's not only startups or Indians, it's also extremely mature companies, top 10 Nasdaq house hold names, such as the story of Amazon illustrates.

AINIRO is Open Source

At AINIRO we've decided to open source our platform. Stories like the above is a large part of our motivation. You see, it's very difficult for us to demonstrate what our platform can do without having others believing that we're somehow a scam ourselves. So to make sure people can peek behind the curtain and verify our claims, we decided to open source license our entire platform. This implies that every time I make a hairy statement in one of my videos, such as the video below, you can literally verify my claims, and reproduce what I am doing locally on your own development machine to keep me straight.

Talking about hairy statements BTW, in the above video I claim I can create a universe - Still you can verify every single claim I make ... 😂

Builder AI's "original sin"

Builder AI did everything wrong, but the first sin they did was to develop a proprietary platform. This prevented others from verifying their claims, and also made sure all their customers (10,000+ companies) rolled over as Builder AI rolled over. At AINIRO we deliver everything as open source. This implies that if we bankroll, you can fork our code, and host it yourself.

In addition, Builder AI would lie to their customers, and I assume also their share holders, and claim they had technology they didn't possess. Yet again, at AINIRO everything is open source, allowing you to verify our claims about our technology.

Are you beginning to see a pattern here ...?

Open source is what "keeps me straight", because every single hairy claim I put forth, can be verified independently by others, scrutinising our code, executing it locally, and reproduce every single claim I put forth. This ensures that it's not even possible in theory for me to run a scam such as the one Builder AI pulled off.

So the next time somebody releases "an amazing AI tool", please do me a favour and ask yourself "Where is the code". If you can't answer that question, you can safely go back to your Magic Cloud cloudlet, and ignore their marketing garbage based upon hype and FOMO.

At AINIRO we try to keep things REAL - And no, we don't need to lie, because our platforms is literally that cool! 😎