not only created a fake AI company that was ‘all humans, no intelligence,'” he also “dared to falsely report 300% revenue to investors.”

Name: builder.ai

  • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    1234 days ago

    AI company

    Uses no AI

    Honestly, the smartest thing they could do

    Bilks investors for $1.5B and then just walks off with the money

    Incredible. Who did they bilk?

    Microsoft

    Lolz.

  • IninewCrow
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    1384 days ago

    Isn’t this the model Capitalist?

    It doesn’t matter what they offer. It doesn’t matter what they build. It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. It doesn’t matter if it is beneficial or not. It doesn’t matter if it is ethical or not. It doesn’t matter if it is moral or not. It doesn’t matter if it is respectful or not.

    All that matters is that it made money.

    That is the sign of a true Capitalist.

    Congratulations on winning that contest.

    • @Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      234 days ago

      dared to falsely report 300% revenue for investors

      I mean, they specifically didn’t make as much money as they claimed to make, so no. That’s pretty much the one mortal sin you can actually commit as a capitalist - accept the capital of other capitalists under false pretenses and then fail to generate returns on their investments.

      • IninewCrow
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        74 days ago

        They play the game as long as possible.

        It’s like a religion at this point in history.

        If you have enough people who blindly believe in the whole thing, no matter how absurd, everything continues to grow and expand. Once enough people lose faith, then the whole system comes crashing down.

    • @nodiratime@lemmy.world
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      274 days ago

      Model growth company right there. They forgot the block chain and some NTFs, then everything would surely have worked out…

  • @AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
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    554 days ago

    Much of “AI” is labour arbitrage, delegating the work to workers in countries with lower wages and weaker labour protections while pretending that the machine that interposes between them is doing it. There’s a joke that AI stands for “absent Indians”.

  • @markstos@lemmy.world
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    334 days ago

    Years ago there was a voice to text transcription service sold as automated that worked by people listening to your voicemails and typing them out.

    • @barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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      154 days ago

      That still exists, they run TV ads all the time. The ads even have print that says that someone listens to the callers and types out what they say.

    • @Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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      64 days ago

      We had 100+ classifying text by hand for a customer on India. The costumer thought it was Deep Learning back then.

    • @Lyrl@lemm.ee
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      24 days ago

      Also see the “autonomous taxi” services that, when encountering anything outside the limited scope their programming can handle, are remotely operated by human drivers.

  • @tabular@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    A billion dollars is a worthless amount of money, apparently. Do investors have no loved ones?

    • @boonhet@lemm.ee
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      124 days ago

      1.5 billion is enough to give everyone in my country about a grand. Won’t change most people’s lives, but I bet it would help thousands of people out of a debt cycle and a lot of people could pull the trigger on some appliance or maybe a car repair that they’ve been putting off. Estonia isn’t poor, but it’s far from rich, even after all those startups.

      • @Hobo@lemmy.world
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        43 days ago

        Just rename Estonia to EstoniAI and people will apparently send you $1.5 billion no questions asked.

        • @boonhet@lemm.ee
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          23 days ago

          Why do that when you can instead partner with ClosedAI for education, meaning we can spend government money on AI bs

  • @_cnt0@sh.itjust.works
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    124 days ago

    To be fair, intelligence isn’t found in anything marketed as “AI”. This one being a scam using humans, actually featured intelligence.

  • misterdoctor
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    144 days ago

    Can’t wait for the investigative podcast that explains how fucked up this place was

  • dinckel
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    114 days ago

    That’s just the reality of half of these companies. Inflated revenue reports, no actual work done, and at best they are just a shit chatGPT wrapper