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August 16, 2019 12:50 am

AI Startup Claims To Automate App Making But Actually Just Uses Humans

Engineer.ai, an Indian startup claiming to have built an artificial intelligence-assisted app development platform, is not in fact using AI to literally build apps, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Instead, the company, which has attracted nearly $30 million in funding from a SoftBank-owned firm and others, is reportedly relying mostly on human engineers, while using hype around AI to attract customers and investment that will last it until it can actually get its automation platform off the ground. The Verge reports: The company claims its AI tools are "human-assisted," and that it provides a service that will help a customer make more than 80 percent of a mobile app from scratch in about an hour, according to claims Engineer.ai founder Sachin Dev Duggal, who also says his other title is "Chief Wizard," made onstage at a conference last year. However, the WSJ reports that Engineer.ai does not use AI to assemble the code, and instead uses human engineers in India and elsewhere to put together the app. When pressed on how the company actually employs machine learning and other AI training techniques, the company told the WSJ it uses natural language processing to estimate pricing and timelines of requested features, and that it relies on a "decision tree" to assign tasks to engineers. Neither of those really qualify as the type of modern AI that powers cutting-edge machine translation or image recognition, and it does not appear that any kind of AI agent or software of any kind is actually compiling code.

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