Latest news with #Builder.ai
The National
a day ago
- The National
AI alone just won't wash – people must be in the pipeline
I needed to spin up a very quick solution to the problem of getting 2025 tourism information in Tiree tidied up into a single usable place which was, crucially, easily updatable. This might surprise some folks, who remain convinced that by talking about the challenges of tourism, and second homes, I am single-handedly trying to destroy the industry. Nothing could be further from the truth – the goal is to try and do tourism better, to the benefit of our communities – but that's a column for another day. READ MORE: 'Completely unprecedented': BBC cuts live feed for Kneecap Glastonbury performance In this instance, I am wearing my Trust comms hat, and trying to ensure that people visiting Tiree get all the information they need at their fingertips. I want to make sure that we are promoting all local businesses, and that we are clearly communicating the key things we want people to know – like how to use passing places, and when and how dogs should be controlled. This is an important part of making tourism sustainable, and beneficial. It should also give the visitor a better experience. Getting that information out to as many people as possible seems like something that technology should be able to simplify. After all, in 2025, isn't everything solved by applying 'AI'? In short, no – but it can help if you know what you are doing. AI doesn't know where we live. It doesn't know what is still open or not open, it has no idea about the realities of visiting an island with no cash machine and cranky crofters (I include myself in that demographic), and it has not a scooby about the vagaries of island life. The problem of getting the details right is not one that's going to be solved by AI and it's not one that's going to be solved by guides that are based on people sucking information off the internet and turning it into a money maker. It's a problem that needs to be solved by people. We understand the difference between information and knowledge. Computers do not. (Image: Unsplash) A disclaimer: I am writing this before the app is launched, and in the full knowledge that I might end up with egg all over my face as the entire concept flops. Such is life. Let's take this information guide as an example of when and how 'AI' is particularly useful. Why am I insisting on putting it in quotes? Because it is not true AI. Not even close. The AI tools we are using are just clever computer programmes with fancy names. Most of the companies producing 'AI' solutions are simply reclothing the emperor. The emperor has had many outfits. Remember Dropbox's early days? It presented itself as seamless cloud magic, but behind the curtain, there was a bloke manually moving files between servers – a classic piece of human-powered sleight of hand. We've seen that before, and now it's happening again with AI. Take once a Microsoft-backed, billion-valuation startup, it claimed its 'AI' assistant Natasha could build apps just by chatting. In reality, however, it leaned on around 700 human engineers in India to do the coding while calling it AI-powered – a textbook case of 'AI-washing'. It's not that it didn't work – it did, thanks to real people – but the magic was all in the marketing, not the algorithm. So back to the practical side of building this thing. The island already has a very good website, but staff at the Trust find it hard to update because the backend of the website is needlessly complicated, and requires them to set aside time to refresh themselves on how to do it every time. When it came to the data, I could have sent AI off to gather all the up-to-date details for businesses in Tiree, to scour the web for the important stuff people need to know and to compile it into a guide. But that would have been a deeply stupid course of action. The internet is full of information about Tiree – some of it right, a lot of it not. There are business websites and social media profiles updated on an ad hoc basis, glossy magazine features with variable accuracy and out-of-date attempts at exactly what I am doing. If you want a good laugh, there's an 'AI'-written guide to Tiree that's so wildly inaccurate it's worth buying for the giggle. (Image: Getty Images) AI doesn't think independently. It draws conclusions from the data it's given. If that data is wrong, so are the results. In this case, the data is far from sound. We would have had to check everything anyway. So we did the data entry manually – copied content, cross-referenced with social media and filled in what we could from public sources. We did the bit AI cannot do – we verified. Content gathering, though, was the easy part. The harder bits were organising the information and making it super simple to update. For users, it had to be laid out in a way that made sense to both visitors and the community. What do we want people to know? What are they likely to miss? What matters here, in Tiree? These are not questions AI can answer. You need to live here, or listen to the people who do. So I asked around, took advice and tried to reflect the priorities of the island. None of that could have come from a chatbot. That part still takes people. Always has. It was the updating part that I was most interested in. If you have an office tech geek with the time to update opening hours in an inscrutable content management system, that's great but those are few and far between. Updating needed to be quick and effortless. I asked ChatGPT how best to do it. It came up with a series of suggestions – including an app builder that runs off a spreadsheet. I had never heard of it, but I was interested. I ended up using it to build the new information app. And the whole thing does indeed run off a Google spreadsheet. To change an opening time, all anyone needs to do is update a spreadsheet cell. That's it. In this case, AI earned its keep by giving me a quick solution I didn't know existed. It offered up an app builder that runs off a spreadsheet, and that turned out to be exactly what I needed. But it only gave the right suggestion because I already understood the 'why' and the 'who'. The software itself also describes what it does as 'AI'. What it actually did was ask me what I wanted, suggest a suitable template and walk me through connecting a spreadsheet and mapping fields to cells. As a front-end person, databases are not my bag, so this worked really well. But let's not pretend it was thinking. It was responding to instructions. So yes – AI helped me build an app. But the purpose, the content, the priorities? That came from here. It didn't speak to the people who live on the island, or consider what makes life easier for visitors and locals alike. I did that. The tool was helpful because the hard part – the understanding – had already been done. Only the season will tell whether other people agree with my understanding.
Mint
2 days ago
- Business
- Mint
We are all stuck in a pyramid scheme fuelled by AI FOMO
Gift this article Here is what I recently read about a company called and perhaps you did too? Here was a $1.5 billion company that had promised to make app designing as simple as 'ordering a pizza" using an AI environment called Natasha. Apparently, the company began to fall apart in 2025 because of a revelation that Natasha was not AI at all and was actually 700 Indian engineers madly typing away. This made me laugh only because it dug up a memory of a video or a cartoon in which we go to the ATM, press buttons expecting high-tech delivery of cash but meanwhile there is someone behind the wall in a safari suit whose manly arm comes out of the slot. You know, low-tech silliness. Not that bad decisions leading to the loss of employment and well-being of innocent parties is otherwise funny in any way. Here is what I recently read about a company called and perhaps you did too? Here was a $1.5 billion company that had promised to make app designing as simple as 'ordering a pizza" using an AI environment called Natasha. Apparently, the company began to fall apart in 2025 because of a revelation that Natasha was not AI at all and was actually 700 Indian engineers madly typing away. This made me laugh only because it dug up a memory of a video or a cartoon in which we go to the ATM, press buttons expecting high-tech delivery of cash but meanwhile there is someone behind the wall in a safari suit whose manly arm comes out of the slot. You know, low-tech silliness. Not that bad decisions leading to the loss of employment and well-being of innocent parties is otherwise funny in any way. Also read: Banu Mushtaq's recipe for Gobi Manchurian Life can be full of hard-to-believe-is-this-true comedy but apparently in the case of I hear that this story wasn't quite it. The truth about collapse was reportedly more about investors finding out about sketchy accounting. was allegedly not making as much money as it was telling its investors it was. You can see why someone wanted the other story to be true. The idea of Natasha on the outside being Nitesh on the inside with a BE and not just one Nitesh with a BE but many Niteshes with many BEs, is irresistible. Financial investment is also about wanting stories to be true. It might sound rational but often it is about finding some stories irresistible. When I was a girl living in a Malayali world, the news from my parents' hometowns in Kerala came in steady waves that made patterns easily discernible. One year, everyone was enthusiastically planting manjiyam to get rich, manjiyam being a kind of acacia tree. Another year we heard, everyone was into teak. I don't remember what was special about these goats but one year was Peak Goat. Emus came along much later but they did. The special feature about these get-rich-quick schemes is that it feels very democratic. It is the opposite of your uncle from the Gulf going into the forest in Wayanad with his two brand-new friends who know exactly where to find a secret cobra with a jewel on its forehead. A goat in hand is better than a snake in Kalpetta. No one got rich with manjiyam. All of last year, watchdogs of financial markets, institutional investors and other folks who are in the long game have been warning the world of 'AI washing". This can be confused with AI washing machines which promise to dissolve detergent in water before the wash cycle starts but let's not get distracted. AI washing is not so terribly exciting as technology sold as AI to excite investors who are looking for a new high. A good 69% of Indian CEOs are hopping with their legs crossed, investing in AI even though they don't quite know what it can do One of the most honest stories I have read in this context was in an Outlook Business report about IBM's 2025 CEO study. The study reportedly showed that FOMO was pushing investment in AI and that Indian CEOs were stressed because the revenue was not rolling in yet. In case that was one acronym too many, FOMO is the fear of missing out and the reason why small children hop about with their legs crossed rather than go to the bathroom. A good 69% of Indian CEOs are hopping with their legs crossed, the report says, investing in AI even though they don't quite know what it can do because they are afraid of missing out. I recently wrote a set of at-home exams and my 16-year-old nephew asked me what is stopping me from using ChatGPT. On WhatsApp I am hindered from climbing on to my soapbox and becoming a bore about how thrilling it is to be able to study in my old age. So instead I just said that in these exams, it was not about getting correct answers from texts, it is about being able to say something new. Of course, folks working in education are constantly having to warn students that generative AI can get things wrong too. And that it skips the steps of knowledge creation where humans first get things wrong, then right, then they get wonderfully inventive. Also read: When we mock the working class, the joke is on us Casey Fiesler, an information science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has an excellent explanation for why ChatGPT is not a search engine. Large Language Models, she says, is not searching for data, it only has a 'statistical echo" of data. ChatGPT gets things wrong, Fiesler says, because it is 'statistically probable, linguistically fluent not verifiably accurate." I heard this explanation and felt a deep sense of déjà vu—an echo of tech bro desire that doesn't mind being wrong as long as it happens fast and sounds smooth. The being wrong part is a problem, of course. It is the fast part that I think is a bigger problem. Why is everyone dying to be so fast? Why have big companies transferred their FOMO to not letting their employees go to the bathroom? Why do CEOs not want their employees to stay at home and look at their husbands or wives? People who already have a crazy amount of money feel like it isn't enough. And like the people who worked for the pharaohs, we are stuck in their pyramid scheme. With the disclaimer that I find a hand sticking out of the ATM slot funny, I want to say, my friends, AI is beginning to feel a wee bit manjiyam. Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories. ChatGPT gets things wrong because it is statistically probable, linguistically fluent not verifiably accurate. Topics You May Be Interested In
Mint
10-06-2025
- Business
- Mint
10 Indian AI startups and products to watch out for
The landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) startups in India is a complex one. Although there may be rapid innovation, India risks falling behind its global peers in the race for worldwide dominance. Just a few days ago, Accel, a venture capital firm, warned that Indian AI startups risked falling behind global peers unless they were 'chasing scale aggressively". Accel partner Shekhar Kirani said, 'In the Valley, it's a warzone. Engineers are building, iterating, raising money, and chasing scale aggressively. In India, many still operate in peacetime mode, trying to optimise for capital efficiency, fixing bugs, and selling to five customers. That's not how you win this AI cycle." Basically, it's not all rosy for the Indian AI startup market. Just take a look at the much-hyped Krutrim, an LLM launched by Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal in December 2023. Krutrim's customer base has not grown rapidly for its LLMs and cloud products. It has also been plagued with several technical issues. Then there was previously known as a 'no-code AI-powered platform". Their ethos? Simplifying app development? Microsoft, the Qatar Investment Authority and others backed it. The reality, you ask? relied on around 700 human engineers who wrote code for client projects, which were presented as if they were AI-generated. at its core, was a fraud company. But there is also good work happening in the field of Indian AI. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Google are separately encouraging Indian AI startups to expand and have world-leading products. In 2024, Google announced its plan to train 10,000 AI startups in India. This was through a partnership with MeitY Startup Hub. Also read: Watch Reels and Shorts for fun, not health advice. Here's why Last month, 10 Indian AI startups—PrivaSapien Technologies, Staqu Technologies, SatSure Analytics, Storyvord, VolarAlta, Smartail, Secure Blink, and Voicing AI—were selected for a global acceleration programme in Paris. This was part of the IndiaAI Startups Global Initiative, which is a MeitY effort in partnership with Station F and HEC Paris. AI startups are expected to undergo rapid evolution over the next few years. But, at this point, a few well-established startups are leading the way. Let's check them out: NeoSapien's Neo1 NeoSapien has come up with Neo1, India's first AI wearable, which claims to be a digital 'second brain" that captures conversations, tracks emotions, and serves as an AI companion that helps you in your daily life. It's a pendant-style AI wearable worn around the neck, priced at ₹9,999 (with a year of AI services bundled and ₹499 per month thereafter). This device wants to help organise your life, and as a bonus, it can even gauge your emotions. Neo1 currently has no direct competitor in the Indian market. As a promising product, and one that hasn't been widely adopted globally, can the pendant live up to all its promises? After all, it Haptik One of the leading players amongst the generative AI startups in the country is none other than Haptik. They have changed the game when it comes to business-to-customer interaction. Haptik specialises in conversational AI, including chatbots and virtual assistants, for providing real-time support and personalisation to customers. Haptik automates customer service by integrating AI, making it cost-efficient for the company. Haptik is used in e-commerce, telecommunications, banking and other sectors. To boil it down, Haptik offers companies a scalable way to manage customer interactions using no-code bots. Sarvam AI Sarvam AI was founded in July 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar. Their aim is simple. They aim to make Generative AI accessible at scale in India. Both founders met at AI4Bharat, a research initiative that focuses on open-source Indian language AI. A few weeks ago, Sarvam unveiled its flagship Large Language Model (LLM), Sarvam-M. It's a 24-billion-parameter system and is based on a smaller model called Mistal Small. It's basically an intelligent AI assistant that can handle tasks ranging from math questions to responding in multiple Indian languages (10, to be precise). Law Bot Pro In 2023, then-final-year law student Mandaar Mukesh Giri from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University developed a free legal AI app called Law Bot Pro. 'I wanted to develop an app which would benefit everyone by giving them 24/7 access in an easy to use and understandable manner to answer their legal queries," Giri told Bar & Bench. Law Bot Pro ensures that even those without legal knowledge can access the necessary help. Giri developed the app in collaboration with his brother-in-law, senior software engineer Utsav Beri, and sister Mohini Giri, a specialist in criminal law. The Law Bot Pro chatbot is modelled on the ChatGPT framework. All the user needs to do is to input a query, and a concise response will be received. Law Bot Pro aims to democratise legal understanding for all. Niramai Niramai was founded back in July 2016 and revolutionised breast cancer screening with the use of thermal imaging and AI. Thermal imaging is used to detect abnormalities and assess the health of the breast. Thermal imaging measures the temperature variation from the chest and is analysed using in-house software developed on AI. The in-house software leverages AI to analyse 4 lakh temperatures per person. This is a cost-effective solution that provides women with a safe and comfortable means of getting scanned, especially in rural areas. 3003 BC Who said AI and olfactory sensors can't be combined to build the perfect perfume? Well, just ask 3003 BC. All the customer needs to do is to fill out a scientifically designed questionnaire. The AI will give them insights into their personality, olfactory preferences, and mood. The AI then analyses multiple possible combinations and churns out three samples. Those three are then sampled by the customer, who then select their preferred combination. Once selected, the consumer will receive a 100ml hand-polished luxury glass bottle filled with their chosen perfume. Thereafter, they can customise the packaging with their name and scent signature. Why the name 3003 BC, you ask? The earliest references to perfumes date back to the Mesopotamian Age, hence the name. Upliance While everyone loves ghar ka khaana, not everyone is well-versed in cooking. That's why Upliance, a Bangalore-based startup founded by IIT-Mumbai alumni Mahek Mody and Mohit Sharma, came to life. They have launched their flagship product, delishUp. It's an intelligent cooking assistant. The goal here is to transform the experience of preparing a meal for consumers with varying levels of cooking experience. It has a touchscreen interface, a range of culinary functions, and AI integration as its backbone. delishUp has guided recipes, nutritional information and support through ChatGPT. Now, with delishUp, anyone can create a delicious home-cooked meal. The device itself is relatively compact and connects to the internet via Wi-Fi. It's leading the industry in the smart kitchen technology segment. delishUp offers over 500 pre-loaded recipes across five key categories. It can automate 16 different cooking functions, including chopping, mixing, stirring and more. The machine can churn out a meal for four or fewer people. Infivention Technologies Pvt Ltd Thanks to the meteoric rise of Gukesh Dommaraju, chess has experienced a surge in popularity in India like never before. Infivention's own Square Off is an AI-powered chessboard that, ideally, should fly off the shelves. Square Off is the world's first telerobotic, AI-powered chessboard. With Chessboard, you can now play chess against the board. Yes, you can play against the board in real-time. The chess pieces are moved by the board itself. Furthermore, there are 20 difficulty levels to choose from. One other handy feature is multiplayer. With the SquareOff app, you can challenge anyone anywhere in the world, as the company has tied up with Their moves will be reflected physically on the board. The company may have been founded by Atur Mehta and Bhavya Gohil in 2015, but SquareOff is a revolutionary product. The product has been used in over 70 countries! Bhashini Bhashini is an AI tool developed by the central government to bridge the dialect divide. Amitabh Nag joined the government in July 2022 to spearhead Bhashini. It's an initiative launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and it's an AI-powered language translation platform that aims to make India's diversity more inclusive, specifically by breaking down language barriers. Bhashini utilises AI and natural language processing (NLP) to build a range of translation, communication, and transaction-related services. For now, Bhashini has mastered 36 mainstream languages. It's on a pathway toward understanding their regional dialects. In fact, the Lok Sabha Secretariat and MeitY signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to revolutionise parliamentary operations, which was named 'Sansad Bhashini'. This will provide in-house AI solutions for multilingual support and streamlined processes. is an AI-powered video creation tool. It is a text-to-video generation platform. One can now make professional-looking videos within minutes. Founded by IIT Bombay alumni Ashray Malhotra and Nisheeth Lahoti, and IIT Roorkee alumnus Shivam Mangla, the startup was acquired by San Jose-based software giant Adobe in November 2023. The valuation wasn't disclosed. Also read: OnePlus 13s review: A compact flagship for small hands and tight pockets
Time of India
09-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
A startup was said to be ‘passing off' humans as AI. That's not why it collapsed
Once valued at $1.5 billion, the Microsoft-backed was supposed to make app-building 'as easy as ordering a pizza'. But then, it was alleged that its 'AI' was fake. And eventually, it was said, so were its revenues It is the most ' high-profile ' AI startup collapse in recent times. And a convoluted story ties it to story begins with a startup that said it could help anyone put together an app without any code — in 2016 , long before ChatGPT and Claude made it look so easy. The London and Los Angeles-based startup was founded by a British entrepreneur of Indian origin, Sachin Dev Duggal , and would eventually be known as . And, as the 'ai' in its name indicated, it would use artificial intelligence to turn app-building into what it said would be a process ' as easy as ordering a pizza '.
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Administrators lined up for UK arm of Microsoft-backed Builder.ai
Administrators are on standby to handle the collapse of the UK arm of a Microsoft-backed start-up which has filed for bankruptcy protection in the US. Sky News has learnt that Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) has been lined up to oversee the insolvency of UK entities. News of the impending appointment comes days after which was founded by Sachin Dev Duggal, collapsed in the US. Money latest: Mr Duggal stepped down earlier this year. had raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, including a Qatari sovereign wealth fund, helping it to achieve a 'unicorn' valuation of more than $1bn. The company said it used artificial intelligence to make the process of building an app "as easy as ordering pizza". In recent weeks, however, media outlets including the Financial Times have alleged the company used potentially bogus sales figures to attract investment. Read more from Sky News: The newspaper also reported that Mr Duggal had sounded out potential backers to buy the business out of insolvency proceedings. It was unclear on Friday whether any meaningful assets remained within UK corporate entities. A spokesman for A&M declined to comment.
