Microsoft-backed UK tech unicorn Builder.ai collapses into insolvency

Can we bring back Webshit Weekly while we're at it? RIP n-gate, you would have loved talking shit about AI companies.

Oh man, I forgot about ZomboCom

You're right. It would be a prime time to launch ZombAI

Still up!

https://zombo.com/

To push back at your obvious facetiousness, I do think that both cryptocurrencies and machine learning are very powerful and useful technologies. Underneath the scammers, grifters and investors that jump on the hype train for their get-rich-quick schemes, and the general public that falls for it and fuels the hype train, both technologies have solid reasons for existing, and can be generally very useful to humanity.

So I reject the notion of throwing the baby out with the bath water as much as the hype bubble around them.

What we do need, as with any novel technology, is oversight and regulation. Which is difficult this time around when the grifters are also the ones in power.

I don't think those are good examples, though. They were just ahead of their time, and poorly implemented. But an AI assistant that's accurate, immediately available, easier to use than a smartphone app, with better ergonomics, that integrates with other services ("agentic"), etc., is a billion-dollar idea. Someone will eventually crack this problem and produce a product that everyone will want. Just like Apple did with the iPhone, it will take a few years of lackluster products to get there. It's a matter of the tech getting good enough, affordable enough, and for someone to put the pieces together in the right package.

Those were special cases in that they were both AI startups and hardware startups, so double the doomed.

I want the bubble to pop so we can start figuring out how to use LLMs in an actual productive way instead of just trying desperately to bolt them into every workflow because we're chasing the hype

I don't know how much do I agree.

I mean, I'm a software developer and we have AI tools that we use, maybe not customer facing, but we have internal tools that provide lots of value.

Random example #1: we regularly scrape our competitors for their prices and offers, but it's insane to maintain all of that because our competitors update their pages/dom frequently so this doesn't scale over dozens of competitors and thousands of products. We replaced thousands of Playwright scraping code with few hundreds of lines of instructions for an LLM to find the information on the pages itself (it can figure out where/what is).

Random example #2: we sell some products that require lots of customer care and instructions as we're in the home maintenance business and sometimes there are questions about products and their installations that are extremely specific and we do have a chat and call center for our customers to assist them. What our customer care reps do is that they need to find and combine information often from multiple hundreds-page long PDFs. Thus we built an OCR+Rag pipeline to assist our customer care reps. This has provided tremendous value and cut our costs by a lot. It also has the potential to replace them completely and move them to other tasks, but it's gonna be a long time before we can really trust an LLM for that. The risks of giving incorrect or wrong information is too great right now. But internally customer care reps can double check the information as the LLM points out the original pdf sources (up to the specific line).

On top of that I'd say that there's also other tools that both make money and help us, such as AI in creative software like Adobe tools. Some of our graphic experts said that this speeds them up a lot, we need to produce or edit tons of images, illustrations, etc for our products.

And those are just few random examples of how AI definitely can speed up and improve margins of our company, while making cloud and saas vendors money too.

That is indeed the song of venture capital.

Start here: https://admission.stanford.edu/apply/

I mean it's kinda amazing, this was just in 2019 that this company was basically lying about being able to do this to get investment, yet now I can actually do it myself, right now, for free*. Incredible - where will we be in another 5 years?!!!

* - with AIStudio at least...

Could that be because 99% of mass medias who make or break politicians are owned by a small elite of hardcore capitalists who have their own interests in mind?

Democracy isn't just about showing up every few years and putting a name in a ballot, it's a framework that requires a whole bunch of other things. A lot of EU countries and the US are getting closer and closer to oligarchies

What do you mean by this? Do you mean in the UK, where this company was based.

How are UK citizens voting for deteriorating services?

Did you go to same university, the same clubs?

Have a look at lot of founders on linkedin. You'll notice a lot go to the same small set of universities, or worked for same companies. Then there's the odd exception. But they're the exception.

Its silly to think talent is actually that concentrated.

I think everybody knows why some people can get investment to literally throw down the drain on insane moon shots, while others struggle to even survive. I'm sure lots of people have moonshot ideas that might work. Only a very small in group get investment.

The orgs investing millions usually aren’t looking to invest small or even profitable most the time.

If there’s a good growth story contact people who write smaller checks who would also be interested in using the product.

If your networking skills and levels of resourcefulness are such that you're asking random people on HN how to talk to investors, it's very unlikely that any of these investors will invest in you. So the answer is to invest heavily in improving at those two areas.

Do you have a plausible path to 10x+ing tens of millions in capital?

Ultimately the business of VC means that you're dealing with people how have a high risk tolerance but need the potential high payout to balance their risk.

If you have a sustainable, profitable, but small business that needs capital to expand, but likely won't grow significantly, you're better off talking to a family office or individual investors. I'd avoid banks if you can help it.

If you actually do think you have a plausible VC investment then it's a game of networking. Go through every person you know and look for someone who knows someone who can give you an introduction. If all else fails there's cold outreach but those can be difficult. You might need to bring on a partner who can handle that side of things if it's critical to your business.

If you're already profitable, these types of investors will not be interested. They are looking for companies they can take public at massively inflated valuations based on growth projections totally removed from economic reality.

It's not "case and point". It's case in point.

The dirty secret of an awful lot of these LLM SAAS companies is that AWS are giving them tens of thousands of dollars to bootstrap, which they are paid back for with 8 figure investments from VCs. Anyone who is putting their own money on the line for anything other than the very first $100 or so for a PoC is being conned.

Not really a trademark infringement.