“Natasha” Turned Out to Be Human: How 700 Indians Were Writing Code Under the Guise of AI
When the startup BuilderAI launched “AI Natasha,” promising to create an app based on your request within minutes, the world sighed — yet another revolution in development. In reality, the “neural network” was forwarding tasks to an office in India, where more than 700 programmers manually wrote code, pretending it was a marvel of machine intelligence. Over 8 years, “Natasha” raised $445 million in investments, including from Microsoft, and only went bankrupt in 2025. Human intelligence instead of algorithms.
The illusion of AI functionality was perfectly maintained: the code was just as opaque as the outputs from a machine learning black box. The programs often didn’t work — perfectly mimicking the bugs of a “trained model.”
Signs of “Natasha’s” code:
– Unreadable variables and missing comments
– Unstable builds with random errors
– Missing key features or their clumsy implementation
Xrust.ru believes this story is not just a failure of BuilderAI but a lesson for the industry: without a dose of truth, even the most expensive startups will collapse if the “AI” label hides nothing more than a mass of exploited people.
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https://xrust.ru/news/311230-natasha-okazalas-chelovekom-kak-700-indusov-pisali-kod-pod-vyveskoj-ii.html
