Really artificial, fake intelligence.

Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Big Data Digest” (ID :BigDataDigest), the author of the Digest.

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real person code farmer

AI financing has a bubble, which everyone knows. But how big can this bubble be?

A star AI startup called Engineer.ai has just set a new record. The company, which uses ai as a domain name, was created by two Indian founders and claims to be able to automatically “assemble” new code through artificial intelligence programs that assist companies that lack engineers. You can automatically generate your own website and mobile app for anyone and company like a custom pizza.

Low fees, fast speed, big market! The idea quickly gained a bid, attracting a total of $29.5 million in venture capital, including Softbank’s artificial intelligence special fund Deepcore Inc. and several other well-known investment companies, which made Europe’s largest A round of financing last year.

But just yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that some internal employees revealed that Engineer.ai has no AI.

Most of the demo production and software generation that he claims is currently done by Indian and other human engineers. Even this company has not even a decent team of artificial intelligence experts. What can be called technical inside is the decision tree.

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real person code farmer

How did the company fool Softbank and a number of investment institutions? Take a look together.

Automatically generate “magic AI” for websites and apps

“We have built a software and artificial intelligence called Natasha that allows anyone to customize an app like pizza.” Engineer.Ai founder Sachin Dev Duggal said in an interview in India last year.

Engineer.ai publicly claims that its “Manual Assisted AI” allows everyone to create mobile apps by clicking on the menus on their website.

The key product of Engineer.AI is its Builder tool, which is aimed at people who want to create applications or e-commerce sites for their business, but who suffer from no technology or budget to support development. Duggal cited an example. A French ski school with 200 coaches wanted to make a website and application that connected to different systems, but couldn’t afford the $500,000 needed to customize the software.

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real person code farmer

Engineer.AI

Duggal said that because most of the code that supports popular apps is similar, the company’s “Manual Assisted AI” can assist companies that lack engineers to automatically “assemble” new code. Duggal said at the time that about 82% of the company’s recently developed applications were “engineer.ai, completed within an hour.”

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real person code farmer

Engineer.ai founder Sachin Dev Duggal speaks at a technical conference in Toronto. Image source: SPORTSFILE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Sounds very tempting! The digestive bacteria also found this website and went to test it.

URL:

https://www.engineer.ai/

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real person code farmer

Interestingly, before creating, users can also choose existing apps that are similar to their ideas, such as Uber or Facebook. Then, Engineer.ai can start automatically creating the basic parts of the application.

The digestive bacteria chose the “mobile phone application” type, and the similar product was selected by Quora (an overseas app that is similar to “know”).

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real person code farmer

After selection, you will enter the work interface. It will be a design and ask if you need to adjust.

After each interface is selected, it is like this.

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real person code farmer

At this point you will find a maximum estimated price in the upper right corner. It may be a bit sad to talk about the money at this time. Sure enough, the next step is to ask the platform I need to build and the speed of production.

The website will automatically give the price and time estimate for design and construction. The preliminary design of the software is 2 months, and the final delivery is estimated to be February 2020.

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real person code farmer

The digestive bacteria currently chooses the design and the basis of the entire software. After the selection, the payment interface will come out.

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real-life code farmer

The maximum software cost for the entire software is less than $25,000, which is less than RMB 180,000. You can complete a Quara-like software from design to design.The whole process of construction.

This price does not seem to have a particularly large advantage for engineers in China and India compared to manual construction, but for companies with high labor costs in the US and Europe, it is very Attractive, and in the process, demo real-time generation and time price estimation, it is said that it is also based on machine learning.

On the official website of the company, the founder of this company has a very bright background. Both founders graduated from Imperial College of Technology in the UK and met there, and then successively founded a number of technology companies. Until the establishment of Engineer.ai in 2017.

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real-life code farmer

Invest quickly to invest heavily and become the largest A round of investment in Europe

Star founder + in line with market expectations, this ai company quickly gained the attention of a large number of investors, including Lakestar, which has invested in Facebook and Airbnb, Singapore-based investment company Jungle Ventures, and of course, Softbank.

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real person code farmerJungle Ventures In the overseas investment project of the official website, Engineer.ai is described as “customizing software through manual assisted AI”.

In November last year, Engineer.ai announced that it had completed a $29.5 million Series A financing, led by Lakestar and Jungle Ventures, and SoftBank’s DeepCore. And this base is in London and Los AngelesThe start-up company of the company also made the largest round of Al round investment in Europe last year.

Last year, Japanese technology giant SoftBank Group Corp. launched an investment fund dedicated to artificial intelligence with an estimated capital of $108 billion. This investment has also become the first overseas project invested by Softbank DeepCore, an AI special fund.

A spokesman for Deepcore said he is confident in Mr. Duggal’s vision and team. A spokesperson for Jungle Ventures said that as Engineer.ai and its technology investors, he is very proud and added that “the pattern of artificial intelligence is diverse.” A spokesman for Lakestar said that he also works on Engineer.ai and his team. With confidence, “the growth of artificial intelligence will not happen overnight.” He said that Engineer.ai is very cautious in presenting its technology to Lakestar and other investors.

There is no NLP technology and no AI team. The actual technology used is the decision tree

However, the packaging is beautiful again, and the bubble still has a broken day.

According to the Wall Street Journal, several people familiar with the company’s operations (both current and former employees) broke the news. Engineer.ai did not use artificial intelligence to automatically generate code for the application. They said the company relied on artificial engineers in India and elsewhere to do most of the work.

“The company just started the development of this automated development program two months ago, at least one year away from the actual completion.”Some current and former employees said that currently, including Some pricing and timesheet calculations are generated by traditional software rather than AI, and most of the work is done manually by employees.

These employees also revealed to the Wall Street Journal that the company does not have natural language processing technology. The technology actually used within the company is the technology that emerged in the 1950s—the decision tree…and this Definitely not AI.

There is a decision tree inside, but the outside world claims to be building deep learning AI automation software, and selling it.

In the face of the Wall Street Journal’s allegations, Engineer.ai also pointed out that he had posted a statement on his website stating that the software’s “average 60%” was machine completion, and the rest was Human generation. However, when asked again about which part of the product is produced using AI, the speaker is the core technology with these details.The patent refuses to elaborate on the grounds.

Even more shocking is that, apart from no core technical description, the company doesn’t even have a decent R&D team.

According to insiders, there is no advanced machine learning team in the Engineer.ai team. When the first time it was asked to disclose a senior employee with AI expertise, the company gave one.

In the subsequent website statement, Engineer.ai said that artificial intelligence experts are difficult to hire, but recently some researchers in machine learning and artificial intelligence have been recruited. In another statement, the company introduced three team members with experience in data science and other disciplines, but did not elaborate.

Star founder, continuous entrepreneur?

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real person code farmer

Sachin Dev Duggal (right) and Saurabh Pradeep Dhoot (left)

In fact, looking closely at the background of the two founders, Digest found that this is not their first “bubble” venture.

The two founders of Engineer.ai, Sachin Dev Duggal and Saurabh Pradeep Dhoot, who together graduated from Imperial College, also founded a company called Nivio in 2004. The company is committed to desktop virtualization services and announced in 2007 that it will test its first Windows XP-based online desktop service, which is similar to today’s cloud computers, allowing customers to use computer applications without a personal computer. .

The Indian media also reported on the company and two young founders.

However, as of July 2010, the company’s estimated revenue was approximately $5 million, but it has not yet achieved profitability. Early Nivio Companion products were just “tests.” By November 2010, Duggal and Dhoot claimed that their goal was education.

Since no constructive product came out, by February 2012, Nivio had pulled a $21 millionInvesting, the money is the $5.5 billion international company Videocon led AEC Partners. The real reason behind this incomprehensible investment is that Videocon’s chairman, Venugopal Dhoot, is the uncle of Saurabh Pradeep Dhoot.

However after one year of investment, Nivio’s official website was closed and its Twitter feed was dormant, and the company seemed to have disappeared.

Is an artificial intelligence company or a manual company?

It’s not just startups that use AI’s slogans to make various attempts to get attention, and big companies have done this.

Remember Facebook’s text-based virtual assistant Facebook m? Committed to developing a universal assistant who can chat with you and assist in work.

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real person code farmer

But behind the Facebook m artificial intelligence, the agents are hidden. When the chat content becomes too complicated, these agents will take over. Of course, some people think that in fact, agents are always chatting with you.

Now Facebook m has closed the service, claiming it is just an experimental product.

There are also Magic companies that fired for four years, claiming that if you send a text message, you can help you with anything you want to do, such as buying sushi on a yacht and sending a tiger to your door. Or let your parking ticket disappear out of nowhere.

Europe's largest pen financing has deceived Softbank, India's AI company has been exposed to fraud, and behind the automatic development is the real-life code farmer

In just 48 hours, Magic has received more than 17,000 text messages. People think that this is a highly intelligent butler-like artificial intelligence, but behind this is all the real-life services hired by Magic’s contracted agents.

The purpose of making a gimmick is nothing more than getting a lot of investment.