The news about BuilderAI using 700 devs instead of AI is false. Here's why.
I've seen a lot of posts coming out of India claiming "we were the AI". So I looked into it to see if Builder AI was lying, or if this was just a case of unpaid developers from India spreading rumours after the company went bust.
Here's what some of the devs are saying:
> "We were the AI. They hired 700 of us to build the apps"
Sounds shocking, but it doesn't hold up.
The problem is, BuilderAI never said development was done using AI. Quite the opposite. Their own website explains that a virtual assistant called "Natasha" assigns a human developer to your project. That developer then customises the code. They even use facial recognition to verify it's the same person doing the work.
> "Natasha recommends the best suited developer for your app project, who then customises your code on our virtual desktop. We also use facial recognition to check that the developer working on your code is the same one Natasha picked."
I also checked the Wayback Machine. No changes were made to that site after the scandal. Which means: yes, those 700 developers were probably building apps, but no, they weren't "the AI". Because the company never claimed the apps were built by AI to begin with.
Well, it's an India-based company. If you check LinkedIn, most of the employees are based in India.
The issue here is that many people think AI only means LLMs, Transformers, or GenAI. But AI has been around for decades and includes machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks.
So anyone using ML is free to register a .ai domain. There’s nothing wrong with that.
The problem would be if you told customers that your virtual assistant, in this case "Natasha", was creating the code instead of humans.
But that's not what happened here. The company went broke because it was reporting false sales figures.
I've seen a lot of posts coming out of India claiming "we were the AI". So I looked into it to see if Builder AI was lying, or if this was just a case of unpaid developers from India spreading rumours after the company went bust.
Here's what some of the devs are saying:
> "We were the AI. They hired 700 of us to build the apps"
Sounds shocking, but it doesn't hold up.
The problem is, BuilderAI never said development was done using AI. Quite the opposite. Their own website explains that a virtual assistant called "Natasha" assigns a human developer to your project. That developer then customises the code. They even use facial recognition to verify it's the same person doing the work.
> "Natasha recommends the best suited developer for your app project, who then customises your code on our virtual desktop. We also use facial recognition to check that the developer working on your code is the same one Natasha picked."
Source: https://www.builder.ai/how-it-works
I also checked the Wayback Machine. No changes were made to that site after the scandal. Which means: yes, those 700 developers were probably building apps, but no, they weren't "the AI". Because the company never claimed the apps were built by AI to begin with.
Verdict: FAKE NEWS