Turns out when they said “AGI”, they meant “A Guy in India”

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Bankrupt Microsoft-Backed ‘AI’ Company Was Using Indian Engineers To Fake It: Report

Last week, British AI startup backed by Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Authority, Builder.ai, filed for bankruptcy after its CEO said a major creditor had seized most of its cash.

Valued at $1.5 billion after a $445 million investment by Microsoft, the company claimed to leverage artificial intelligence to generate custom apps in ‘days or weeks,’ which would produce functional code that had less human involvement.

Now they’ve gone cloth-off… as Bloomberg reports they had a ‘fake it till you make it’ strategy while having inflated 2024 revenue projections by 300%. Instead of AI, the company was actually using a fleet of more than 700 Indian engineers from social media startup VerSe Innovation for years to actually write the code.

Requests for custom apps were based on pre-built templates and later customized through human labor to tailor the requests sent to the company – whose demos and promotional materials misrepresented the role of AI.

According to Bloomberg, Builder.ai and VerSe Innovation ‘routinely billed one another for roughly the same amounts between 2021 and 2024,’ in an alleged practice known as “round-tripping” that people said Builder.ai used to inflate revenue figures that were then presented to investors. In several cases, products and services weren’t actually rendered for these payments.