- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
AI = Actually Indians
I feel conflicted. On one hand, the underpaid work often carried out by Indians is getting recognised. On the other, this is also saying that the collective work of 700 Indians is no different to AI slop.
Well, look at this way. If I were being paid as little as they probably were to do what they were being asked to do whilst also not getting recognized for my contributions as a human and also being treated like machine by people who don’t even speak the same first language as me, I would probably put out pretty sloppy work too.
Wouldn’t the time it takes be a give away?
It says they’d been tricking investors for 8 years, we’ll before ChatGPT. I assume they overpromised in the early years, leveraging labor as a “stopgap” for the developing AI. Then things eventually caught up and they couldn’t deliver, leading to the current situation.
Eight years is a long time, so who was “duped” when can really change the narrative of the headline.
AI --> An Indian
If this were true(for all of them), AI companies would be way more competent than they are lol
Having had a team in India grafted on to help me with a project. AI would’ve been an equally useless time suck.

oof
It’s not true, you can check this article debunking this claim written by Gergely Orosz (Pragmatic Engineer Blog) : https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/builder-ai-did-not-fake-ai/
The racism against Indians is so normalized, trying to discredit and dehumanize Indians, it’s horrendous! Be objective and have some empathy…
It’s a London-based company. How would they know any better?
Yeah, I was thinking it’s impossible to fake AI codegen with humans, for however terrible it is, it vomits the code it generates quickly.
I of course take issue with:
LLMs were already more than capable of generating high-quality code.
That claim will remain unjustified so long as LLMs equally generate imagined function calls and such as much as they like ‘real’ function calls.
But in any event, it’s also telling that despite ostensibly being a company focused around AI code gen, when it came to doing stupid in-house stuff that didn’t need doing they went with a bunch of human developers. And many of those are knock-offs of projects that should be pretty firmly in the territory of LLM codegen to let you ‘vibe code’.
Thank you. The company failed due to bad upper management and so-so products on unfair deadlines that weren’t novel. The workers themselves did just fine, considering the circumstances and bad leadership.
GPT: Gujarati Professional Typist
How dare you. I’m not Gujarati.😡
They should have noticed something was wrong when the company asked for iTunes gift cards as payment
WHY DID YOU REDEEM IT
Outsourced Indian dev code was shit 20 years ago. So now it can be shit again. Progress.
Offshored/outsourced code is generally shit regardless of where it comes from.
Question is generally 'how is it that using this company thousands of miles away is so much cheaper? Business folks like to think it’s just because the country is poor, but no, the answer is that it is a grift. It is always a grift.
The good developers in that location? They are too busy doing work for real companies paying real money. Maybe less than an American makes, but not as dramatic as management imagines. So companies looking to offshore will never pay enough to get the actual talent in a geography. What happens when someone competent actually lands in one of these arrangements? Gone in 3-4 months after they get a real job after proving themselves.
So what developers are you getting? People who probably had the equivalent of a high school programming course and didn’t really get it, but there’s a company that will pay money to anyone with some arbitrary ‘certiificate’ that they can claim to clients means you are a trained software developer. They don’t know your use case, and they don’t care. They utterly fail at being competent, but who is going to call them on it? Management has no clue, and besides, it was their idea to outsource, so it has to be a good idea. Leftover technical talent that you kept on as a skeleton crew to supervise the outsourced effort? Oh they are just whining and trying to protect their jobs and being overly dismissive of the offshored staff because it suites their self-interest.
Offshoring is a big old grift wherever they set up shop.
But now instead of blaming a junior dev they can hit you with the, “Our apologies for this issue - we are modifying the prompts for the model and re-running in-unit AI tests, will revert back to you”, and charge slightly more.
Analog intelligence.
Artificial artificial intelligence.
What if the the employed Indian is using builder.ai to help him build said software to builder.ai?
Then there’s only one super intelligent coder from the 700 that’s actually doing work.
That sounds like a perpetual motion machine.
AAI
There’s also a lot of manual human labor to build LLMs, I was surprised. From exploited African data labelers who have to shift through the most horrific things the web has to offer and remain traumatized for life, to highly paid domain experts who work on improving final results so it ends up looking like a simulation of themselves.
That sifting through crap isn’t just an AI thing.
Pretty much any big site with user generated content and moderators has to have people who deal with seeing that shit.
It’s a really shitty underpaid job.
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!
Mechanical Turks for everyone!
They’re all code names “Al”.
Old article regurgitated yet again
Fucking awesome. AI is doing so well you guys! It can code because Blablabla Stack Overflow copecopecope, it will soon be good in other areas too!
How many Ls do you need to collect before you realize something?!














