Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throawayonthe 269 days ago
what are they even reffering to, what does AI stand for in relation to India?
1 comments

"Actually Indians" was coined to refer to "AI" products which turn out to be outsourced human labor in disguise. Builder.ai was the most infamous example.
Not the biggest example; Amazon pulled the same trick.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/10/amazon...

The idea that Builder.ai was Indian workers being sold as AI wasn’t true, by the way. That was made up by a crypto influencer on twitter and copied by sloppy news sites. They were a consulting firm that also sold an AI product, with the two clearly separated.
It's amazing to me that the human-labour-in-disguise thing was first reported in 2019, but the company only went bankrupt in 2025.
The PowerPoints that sold investors on the company were written and discussed by humans.