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.
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.
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 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.
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.
There is a professional gambler in Australia[0] who has the betting companies _compete_ for his business and offer him rebates on volume. His firm is double-digit percentage of the Australian betting market and employs ~hundreds of professional traders, developers etc. (it operates no diff to a hedge fund).
As an aside - it was his firm that was responsible for the recent "breaking" of the Texas lottery[1]
Following the public reporting timeline of builder.ai lays out a fascinating story akin to Theranos or Wework. I'm sure we'll get an exhaustive account of exactly what happen in due course, and there will likely be other such cases that come out of the most recent AI investing boom.
Aug 2019 - WSJ report that for builder.ai the "AI" means "Actually people in India"
Congrats on the launch! Better Auth has a level of universal love from developers that's really seen.
Just one suggestion - remove the F-bombs from the testimonials on your homepage. There are various firewall intel providers that will put you on the bad lists because of this. You usually learn this the hard way :/
Lots of regular people use Have I Been Pwned and sending them to 1Password is probably the single best thing you could do for them (I know it's a sponsorship - but it's a very complimentary one).
I'd make the language around that promo banner stronger (ie. "We strongly recommend") and make it stand out more on the page.
So many social media accounts get hacked[0] because of shared passwords and those affected users often end up on the site - funnelling them to a password manager and a reason why it's good hygiene is great.
ps. congrats on the relaunch!
[0] I've probably assisted 20+ such cases in the past ~12 months
It's a sponsorship, so I'm not complaining, but if the goal was really to get people to use a password manager he would be sending them to Bitwarden since they have a free plan, plus their paid plan is only $10/year compared to $36 for 1Password.
Besides the pricing, is there any reason to prefer Bitwarden over 1Password? Been happily using 1Password for some years, never had any issues, but maybe I'm glossing over anything? Probably the cli interface (`op`) is the one feature I couldn't live without today.
I can't speak about the other password managers, but 1Password's architecture ensures even 1Password can't see any of your credentials. It's E2E Encrypted.
I've been a 1Password user for over a decade. It's user friendly, and I'd rather not have the responsibility to self-host my company and extended family's credentials.
They both do e2ee so they cannot read your secrets server-side, which is the standard.
Critically though, Bitwarden is open source, meaning that if the encryption is weakened, it would be noticed in the source.
With 1Password the clients are closed source: you have to trust the company to encrypt the secrets properly and an (malicious or accidental) change of the encryption cannot be detected by the user.
After Lastpass's fiasco around encryption, I don't feel like blindly trusting another company.
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