In 2016, two Indian entrepreneurs, inspired by the prospects of AI, founded BuilderAI. Their key idea was the chatbot 'Natasha', which was claimed to be able to create applications based on prompts.
The project immediately achieved success: all thanks to 'Natasha', an allegedly revolutionary neural network for no-code development, which was compared to ChatGPT. However, there was one catch — 'Natasha' was not a neural network, but a team of more than 700 people.
When a client sent a request, the process looked like this:
Almost always the applications had bugs, the code was unreadable, the functions did not work, but the team managed to fix the bugs — all manually, under the guise of AI.
This is how the company operated for eight years, raising no suspicion. During this time, it attracted 445 million dollars from major IT giants. However, in the end, the startup was declared bankrupt and the scheme was fully exposed.