What everyone missed about Builder.ai

Indian developers are suck

Isn't this normal, though? It's not fraud if what they're doing is using the content created by those devs to further train an AI. That's how all the self-driving stuff works, too. Eventually the AI will be good enough to do all the work, but it needs an ungodly amount of niche data to train on to get there.

Certified Softbank Momento

AI - Actually Indian

We have to stop validating companies by imaginary monetary worth. A valuation isn't cash! You can be a paper billionaire and functionally broke. Most founders don't have the ability to sell off large swaths of equity to get rich because it sends the wrong signals especially in the early stages. Term sheets have conditions even when you get 100 million dollar offer it's usually not all at once you have to hit certain metrics to unlock each stage of capital. 

The problem is that people hear billion dollar company and judge the company off its coveted "unicorn" status without evaluating the tech. I had a WeWork office in Seattle SLU location and even then upon first walking in I knew it was a bad idea and unsustainable in the long term and Softbank was due for an L. 

We have to be more pragmatic and look at the tech first all that other stuff is just fluff in my opinion. Unfortunately AI suffers from the same problem as blockchain/cyrpto an over abundance of grifters whose only purpose is to extract as much cash as possible from their perspective dumpster fires and move on to the next. Builder/V0 and all the AI solutions in that domain are dumpster fires, Jetpack Compose and SwiftUI are declarative making it easy for Apple and Google to create high assurance solutions that allow devs to build native UI's with native prompts in Xcode or android studio. Native wasn't as accessible as solutions like react but AI effectively lowers the barrier to entry to the point where React no longer makes sense. 

SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose frontends with a common backend API are going to be the norm moving forward. Nobody really uses Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc... on the web the vast majority of everyday users are on mobile which is an application centric world. Google search is being killed off by ChatGPT and it's easy to see the trend line at this point and the question is do consumers want solutions that are easier and take less time or favor legacy tech that require significantly more effort? Browsers and Search engines are legacy tech at this point. I no longer think is terms of web as a founder everything is native and mobile first because I can easily just prompt my way to native UI's for both platforms functionally the cost of maintaining SwiftUI and Compose code bases is negligible which means I can ship the highest quality user experience.

Theo reminds me of Weird Al Yankovich. Anyone else see it?? Love your content though!!

amazon sweating profusely

This company is not a new AI startup. It was founded and started in 2016!

what you describe is NOT fraud or any other kind of illegal. no revenue is inflated. its a barter deal. HOWEVER: the value providen may be taxable. and often companies will just do tax fraud by not disclosing exchanged values.

anyway - if you dont need the service, whats the point paying for it?

Besides a previous case of "AI is just a bunch of underpaid Indians" someone literally made a video pretending to be ChatGPT for fun. Give a prompt, get a real (and bad) human drawing back
Softbank involvement doesn't surprise me, it's a somewhat different version of what happened with Deutsche Bank and their "sustainability" asset management. Deutsche Bank/DWS took a rep hit,
and the people they managed for got screwed. Fully admit I'm speaking too soon, only 14 minutes in. But like, I'm not that off the mark right? And oh Theo, you sweet summer child...
Honesty doesn't matter in capitalism, Microsoft got their foot on the door by Bill getting a deal to port BASIC when the port wasn't even written, not one line, it's about being a good salesman. Truth or not

Theo is talking about Convex!

I find it interesting that a lot of tech influencers not long ago were saying things like, don't use leftpad it just adds a dependency when you can easily write that yourself, to now embracing vibe coding where not only does the ai bring in leftpad but 1k other dependencies as well as write tons and tons extra code that isnt needed that you now depend on, and that is now ok for some reason

Who is this guy? Where’s Theo? 👦🏻

AI - Actually Indian

Theo thank you for making these in-depth videos, you touch on so many important aspects!!

Yay, I can be an accredited investor 🎉 - give me the scoop Theo!

The most important thing everyone should think about now is how to invest in different sources of income that are not dependent on the government. Especially with the current economic crisis around the world. This is still a good time to invest in different stocks like gold, silver and digital currencies. all thanks to Robert Herjavec for coaching.

Learned a lot about YC and Ping, not much about Builder AI 😂

At this point India has become synonymous with scam, fraud and bullshit

I get what you're saying about not funding Ping with T3 content, but is it inherently underhanded for a company you use to not make such distinction? I guess I don't quite understand the underlying necessity in keeping them apart as long as your actions are above board and your team consents to them.

Quark? I knew a Ferengi was behind it!

Lol VibeCode is the new NoCode

Posthog ftw!

You sound like an ass. Why are you bad mouthing your investors when you weren’t making them money. Of course they were dicks to you if you couldn’t produce! Why talk about this on your channel, just shut up and let them be man.

AI = Anonymous Indian

So does T3 Content do ads for T3 Tools Inc. services for free?

what if t3 chat is just Theo working 24/7 hmmm

"Never cross streams!" - Ghostbusters... and Theo.

That they come from specific country only ?

Honestly, if they are competent, I don't see the problem.
Their source code is likely better than what say Gemini and Claude can create, because they should be able to troubleshort any real issues that could be localized bugs during testing.

So if their programming chops are good enough, then I fail to see any problem with them.

Yet*

ok, but what if Theo with a mustache pays to Theo without?

I'm honestly clueless on why any of the examples you brought up with the content and the tools company would count as fraud.

I get why the thing the 2 companies allegedly did with billing each other the same amount scattered throughout the year is bad and shady, but why is accepting a sponsorship deal with the content company that benefits the tools company fraud? the content arm being a mediator between the tools arm and the sponsor makes perfect sense to me. The Tools company will foot the bill either way, but in the sponsorship case, tools pays content, and not the provider.

And the tools company paying to be featured as a sponsor to the content arm also makes perfect sense. I'll go further, the tools company getting free sponsorship deals with the content company feels worse. As long as the tools company pays the same amount to be a sponsor as any of the others, I'd say that's the most fair sounding to my intuition.

Where am I going wrong?

"People think T3 chat is less stable than our competition, because I actually explain what goes wrong when we have outages."
It's for this reason I really like T3 Chat, and how you handle everything as a whole. I've completely switch over from perplexity to T3 Chat. And I'm here to stay. Between the MUCH more affordable price tag, extensive model selection, responsiveness, ect, it is overall just a way better service than what I have used prior. I greatly respect people who can own up to and be open about mistakes. And the fact that during the migration outage I got an email response a mere 6 MINUTES from when I sent the email to support just solidified the positive opinion I have of your company as a whole. Keep up the good work!

My business law professor would have a damn conniption over that "we'll give A X if B does Y". Crossing those streams isn't just gross and potentially fraudulent, it's a really good way to make it so that any form of limited liability just stops protecting you.

Softbank really lucked out with the Alibaba investment. But many of their other investments were terrible. None worse than WeWork.

BTW, Theo probably will not see this, but take it from a random person on the internet that what you're doing is 100% the right thing to do. Integrity wins out every time when time horizon is long enough. And that's why people who consume your content trust your takes.

Technically it makes it more actual "artificial intelligence" than only using a trained model lol. Actual intelligent thinking humans as part of the system 😁

AI = Actually Indian

Tbh, you should definitely charge your other company for ads if it makes sense taxation wise instead of salary.

I love everything about you!

i am only surprised why you have not warned the people with all this knowledge.

AI = Actual Indians

"Al: An Indian
API: A Person in India
AGI: A Genius Indian
LLM: Low-cost Labour in Mumbai
GPT: Gujarati Professional Typist"— someone in Primeagen's channel

Startup founders: fake it till you make it
Builder Ai: Hold my Kingfisher

If everyone is making the same thing, collect all the things and make a new model.

As a french guy it's a pleasure to watch an upset American becoming truly vulgar and not hiding behind "f word" etc