It was reported that an Indian startup Engineer AI (Engineer.ai), which also invested in a SoftBank affiliated company, raised funds by exaggerating AI technology.
This company is a startup that provides a platform that even people without technical knowledge can make into mobile apps. For example, it allows users to create applications similar to what they want to create, such as selecting based on popular apps like Uber and Netflix, and customizing and ordering app features like Uber.
Founder Sachin Dev Duggal said in an interview in 2018 that 82% of the apps they developed were built through automation. As these implementation results were evaluated, Engineer AI raised $29.5 million in 2018 from SoftBank subsidiary Deepcore.
However, in reality, it was far from the brilliant image of AI. According to reports obtained by foreign media, there is no evidence of using AI technology in the consignment development of the app in the company document, and it was developed by assigning tasks to a number of engineers including India.
The company has begun building the technology needed to automate application creation in the last two months, and it will take more than a year to utilize AI technology to create applications. Meanwhile, on August 4th, the company introduced AI use cases in application development through its blog. According to this, it is possible to use facial recognition technology to automatically set the development project price and development schedule adjustment using natural language processing analysis and to check whether the requested developer is working. It also revealed that AI technology is being used to determine the skill level in code written by developers.
The media pointed out that this technology uses existing technology, and that the developer level decision also uses the multiple-choice problem that has existed in the past, and that AI technology is not used. Even though AI technology is in an immature state, the phenomenon that AI is becoming a magic word for drawing funds from investors plays a part in the background of technology-related startups advocating AI. Softbank is actively investing in AI. SoftBank Vision Fund 2, which started in August, plans to invest up to 120 trillion won, but the theme is AI.
AI is becoming such a trend, but there is no specific set of what the word AI technology means. There is a problem that it is difficult without technical knowledge to evaluate whether a startup is actually using AI. With the advancement of AI technology, the problem of fraudulent AI companies is likely to become on a scale that cannot be ignored. Related information can be found here .