Posing as an AI

When there's a need, there's a way:

Builder.ai, once touted as a revolutionary AI startup backed by Microsoft, has collapsed into insolvency after revelations that its flagship no-code development platform was powered not by artificial intelligence—but by 700 human engineers in India. 

The company marketed its platform as being driven by an AI assistant named “Natasha,” which could supposedly assemble software applications like Lego bricks. But recent reports and commentary have revealed that behind the scenes, customer requests were manually fulfilled by developers, not machines. 

Commenting on the unraveling, Ebern Finance founder Bernhard Engelbrecht described it in a widely circulated post on X: “Customer requests were sent to the Indian office, where 700 Indians wrote code instead of AI,” adding that the end products were often buggy, dysfunctional, and difficult to maintain. “Everything was like real artificial intelligence — except that none of it was.”