When ChatGPT first arrived, some schools immediately banned the generative AI tool over concerns that students might use it to cheat. Years later, a new AI tool made specifically for cheating is going viral.
What’s even crazier is that the two college students who developed Cluely, the cheating AI in question, got expelled from Columbia after one of them used an early version of the AI program to help with a job interview with Amazon.
Cluely, which you can try for free, just raised $5.3 million in funding, proving that cheating with AI in the age of AI is a thing. But, spoiler alert, the product Cluely proposes might become much bigger than something that helps you cheat during job interviews.
21-year-old Chungin “Roy” Lee went viral a few weeks ago by posting on social media news that Columbia kicked him out after he used an AI tool called Interview Coder to get a job with Amazon.
Interview Coder was a program that Lee (CEO of Cluely) and Neel Shanmugam (COO of Cluely) developed before turning it into a viral gimmick. Interview Coder is now part of Cluely, which you can try for free to cheat at whatever you want. It can listen in on Zoom calls in real time and provide helpful answers to questions.
Cluely doesn’t just work with job interviews. It’ll handle anything you throw at it as long as it involves operating a video chat tool like Zoom that Cluely AI can monitor.
The Cluely app, currently available on Macs, runs inside an in-browser window that the other person in the Zoom call can’t view. The AI will listen to what the other person is saying, turn that speech into text, and feed it to an unnamed AI in the cloud, which will then tell you the right thing to say.
There are obvious moral implications here, as well as legal ones. Using Cluely means bringing a third party into a video call that records everything and then sends that data to the cloud. Some businesses and even state laws require you to obtain consent when recording people. But if you’re cheating your way into something, obtaining consent is probably not a big concern for you.
Still, Cluely is getting plenty of attention. Lee just announced that Cluely raised $5.3 million in funding from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures. Lee told TechCrunch the app surpassed $3 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue) earlier this month.
That doesn’t mean the company is making $3 million off Cluely. That’s the potential revenue in a year based on the current number of paying subscribers. However, it shows that people see value in the app.
Cluely is available for free on macOS right now, but the responses that the AI will give you are limited. The $20/month Cluely Pro subscription gets you unlimited usage, “solving and debugging” support, “most powerful agent models,” and 24/7 customer support.
Using Cluely to cheat on interviews will only get you that far, especially since some interviewers may now be aware that Cluely exists. But I see huge potential in an app like Cluely for setting up a personal assistant of sorts.
The existing Cluely app doesn’t say which AI models it uses. A variant of ChatGPT might very well be working under the hood to provide assistance. Also, the data you send (screenshots and transcripts) may be used to improve the service. That data might be aggregated and anonymized, but you can’t opt out.
The post Columbia student expelled for cheating with AI launches AI to help anyone cheat appeared first on BGR.
