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Comment by felineflock | Hacker News Reader

Not to confuse with builder.IO - poor founder was posting these days "FOR THE LAST TIME GUYS THIS IS A DIFFERENT COMPANY".

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actually he should buy the bankrupt name and be the same company

I expect the builder.ai story will break into the mainstream via a book / documentary. There are some insane details and it's the first large-scale AI hype failure - which people are hungry to get the details on - and some big names involved.

Another failure of dd - I really wonder how high-profile investors pour hundreds of millions into a co without doing something simple like ordering an app using a burner account.

> I really wonder how high-profile investors pour hundreds of millions into a co without doing something simple like ordering an app using a burner account.

You'd think that if you're investing $1M+, there's budget for at least getting an intern / assistant to do that.

Microsoft invested £250M in Inflection AI, £250M in Builder.ai, and has backed several other companies working on LLMs. They’ve been placing strategic bets across the AI space, but only a few of those companies actually had the talent, infrastructure, and funding needed to build real models.

The VP of AI was Craig Saunders, the same person who helped create Amazon Alexa. The problem is, they ran out of money. $500 million sounds like a lot, but it's not even close to what you need to build and train a real LLM. You need billions. Most people just don't realise that.

See: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240611122778/en/Bui...

This is why I think ai is basically the death of startups as we know them. Only big players can even take a swing. No more underdog garage startups, unless you're just downstream getting dorty bath water from the big boys.

Ai all around is purely about consolidation of power and money. It's bad for workers and ultimately probably bad for the startup world and competition more broadly.

I agree. The infra side is dominated by VCs and big players. And the data is in the hands of regulators, who are looking the other way.

DeepSeek cost just over $5M to train. StarCoder cost around $1M, there is no info for Starcoder2 but unlikely to be more than a few million. The idea of spending billions in training is OpenAI trying to build a moat that might not actually exist.

These architectures didn't exist last year. The Chinese are innovating thanks to massive government backing, access to talent, and a clear focus on winning the AI race.

Starcoder was released in 2023, by french/american companies, and there were other coding models before it.

That was right around the time this company had a new $250M funding round, so lack of resources to invest in actual AI is a terrible excuse.

StarCoder is an open-source LLM for code, not text. Builder.ai told investors they were building a virtual assistant called "Natasha", not a code assistant.

I'm just telling you what I read online. Builder.ai wasn't competing with GitHub Copilot, Cody, or CodeWhisperer. Those are code assistants for developers. Builder.ai was building a virtual assistant for customers. It meant to "talk" to clients, gather requirements and automate parts of the build process. Very different space.

And like I said before, creating a dedicated, pre-trained foundation model is expensive. Not to mention a full LLM.

The point is that one doesn't need billions to create useful models — there is no reason they would need new foundation models in the first place — and that 'running out of money' is unlikely to have been their main problem, 250M should be more than enough to create an AI website builder.

I get what you are saying, but you're missing the most important piece of the puzzle: the data.

Everyone talks about models and infrastructure, but without the right data, you've got nothing. And that's where the biggest hidden cost is.

According to the company's own website, they were creating the data themselves. Labelled datasets, transcripts, customer conversations, documents, and more. That's where the real money goes. Millions and millions.

>You'd think that if you're investing $1M+, there's budget for at least getting an intern / assistant to do that.

Or having an AI Agent do it...

maybe this is the first large solely AI failure but algorithms and AIs have done lots of damage before. There have been flash crashes on Wall St, Zillow lost $1B using an algorithm to try and house flip, Klarna is circling the drain after hyping up AI, etc.

Yeah thanks for calling this it. I’ve been following builder.io for a while and seeing builder.ai recently made me think they had possibly pivoted because builder.io has always been on the code generation / design to code / form building space from what I’m aware of.

Opening up gTLDs was a mistake.

Both those are ccTLDs.

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