一切都作弊：Cluely 对始终在线 AI 助手的构想

Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Roy Lee, founder and CEO of Cluely, the AI startup that recently announced a $15 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz after repeatedly going viral both within and beyond the tech community with its provocative invitation to cheat on everything.

It might surprise even some regular listeners to learn that, despite all the concern I've expressed about AI-related existential risks on this feed, I'm usually a fan of edgy marketing and, more generally, of people who dare to challenge what are arguably outdated social norms. And yet, it wasn't the viral videos or the fundraise that inspired me to have this conversation, but rather a surprisingly earnest response to Y Combinator President Garry Tan after he tweeted that he was muting the term Cluely. Roy wrote, “I have big dreams for this company, Garry. I know you might be turned off by the messaging and think that I'm some stupid kid who's doing something immature and unethical, but the end goal of this company is, I believe, a giant positive for humanity.”

That goal, as you'll hear, is to help humanity achieve a utopian world in which humans are free to do whatever they intrinsically want to do, rather than what economic necessity demands. I love that vision, and I applaud the ambition. And yet, I do understand why so many people are uncomfortable with such an aggressive approach to AI adoption, so I tried to channel their concerns throughout this conversation.

We begin by covering Cluely's product: a real-time AI assistant that feeds you relevant information and suggestions during meetings, sales calls, and, yes, interviews. It does this via an undetectable screen overlay that's strikingly similar to Apple's new Liquid Glass and clearly anticipates an always-on augmented-reality form factor in the future.

Beyond that, we discuss Roy's experience getting kicked out of Columbia for posting a video showing how he cheated on an Amazon interview; his thoughts on why his cheating-centric message is resonating so powerfully with young people today; his belief that copyright and privacy norms will dissolve in the face of efficiency gains; his philosophy of AI maximalism and personal code of conduct with respect to AI use; his thoughts on the overemployment phenomenon, which is obviously super relevant in light of this week's Sohamgate story; his advice to people who are trying to evaluate talent today; and, finally, his thoughts on how Cluely can compete with tech giants in the long term.

Overall, I found Roy's answers refreshingly bold, but still quite thoughtful. At a minimum, regardless of whether you're inclined to cheerlead or criticize his approach, you have to recognize that he's thinking much more seriously and concretely than most about what life will look like in a post-AGI world.

Before we dive in, just for the sake of transparency, I did want to note that a16z did not have any role in the creation of this episode. The conversation came together through a simple Twitter DM exchange before the investment was announced. And as always, I am solely responsible for the guests I invite and the questions I ask. In this case, nothing substantive was cut during the editing process.

I hope you enjoy this conversation about AI maximalism and building technology that anticipates—and might actually help create—not just new social norms, but perhaps an entirely new social contract.

With Roy Lee, founder and CEO of Cluely. Roy Lee, founder and CEO of Cluely, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

Thanks for having me, brother. I'm excited for this conversation. You have made quite a bit of noise online in recent weeks. I think anybody who is paying attention to the AI space has certainly seen your face, your posts, and your cinematic, sometimes provocative marketing come across their feed.

I think there's actually a lot to unpack here. For starters, a16z, which recently led a $15 million investment into the company and put out a blog post about why they were doing it, opened that blog post with the provocative question, “What if breaking the rules was the unlock?” And you've got the motto “Cheat on everything.”

For starters, what does it mean to cheat on everything? What does Cluely help me cheat on? Broadly speaking, what is Cluely?

Cluely is the new way that humans will interact with AI. Instead of going to chat.openai.com, we envision a future where people use Cluely instead.

It functions as a desktop app that integrates very deeply with your computer. It has access to your system audio and your microphone, and it shows up as essentially a pane of glass over all your other applications. It feeds you relevant information in real time.

During a meeting, Cluely will take real-time notes, and at any point it will suggest questions that you might have. For example, “What does ‘cheat on everything’ mean?”

“Cheat on everything” means using Cluely to gain an advantage in any situation by instantly accessing relevant information. This is all information that Cluely is feeding me directly: maximizing productivity and performance with AI everywhere. This is all stuff that Cluely literally tells me.

Whenever you mention terms, it will float up definitions of those terms in real time, without you ever knowing that I'm using AI. This is Cluely.

I was using it the other day in a conversation I was having with the CEO of Waymark, who's been a longtime friend of mine, and it was a pretty funny experience. It definitely is.

I'm interested to hear a little bit more about the undetectable screen overlay. It is transcribing and giving you a running diary of what is happening, and then I was constantly refreshing the “What should I say now?” prompt to have it spit up things for me to say. I thought it was pretty good often enough.

I think an obvious challenge, and I'm interested to hear how you think about this from a product-vision perspective, is that a lot of the use cases you've put forward are earlier in relationships, or they're episodic moments, like taking a coding test for a class or a job. These are things where there's not super-deep context.

Another interesting question is going to be how you build up context so that you can get to the point where you can help me in a 10-year-plus relationship, like the one I have with my CEO. There's a ton of stuff that's commonly known and unspoken between the two of us that the thing has never had any chance to access.

So, there are at least two parts there, and you can take it in as many directions as you want. How are you making this undetectable screen-overlay thing work? I haven't tested that, but does that mean that if I take a screenshot, it won't show up? If you take a screen recording, will it show up? Help me understand that a little bit better.

If you take a Mac-native screenshot, it won't show up. If you screen-record on your Mac, it will show up. The Mac screen-recording function operates at a lower level in the operating system.

I think undetectability is just a for-fun feature, essentially. Say you're a sales rep and you're demoing a product, and you want this overlaid on top, but you don't want anybody to know that you're using it. Then the undetectability feature is pretty interesting. If nothing else, it's an interesting marketing hook.

As for context depth, the way we're thinking about this is that it is inevitable that a model will come out with a very extended context window that is fully natively multimodal. You can feed it not just 2 minutes, but 1 year of everything you've done on your computer, and it will be able to reason over it, learn everything about you, and become this hyper-personalized AI assistant—essentially like Jarvis.

I think this is really what every consumer AI company in the world is building toward. The way to win that, I believe—I think we're on the right track with the user experience. Apple pushed out Liquid Glass, which is essentially the exact same UX that we have: a translucent glass-pane overlay on everything.

I think the world is realizing this is how AI will be used in the future. We're the first to market with this UX, and it's a land grab to force people into this interaction pattern. Instead of going to chat.openai.com, you press Command-Backslash, and I'll use AI in the desktop assistant that I have.

Once we lock people into that interaction pattern, then we can collect all this data about them. When the time comes that an open-source model comes out that is superintelligent, we will be the ones to distribute it, and we will have all the data to make this service interesting.

So, the idea now is to prepare for future model capabilities. This is obviously a well-established best practice in AI application development. You want to be preparing for future model capabilities, not just trying to supplement the current models and compensate for their weaknesses, but really positioning yourself for new strengths yet to emerge.

How much data are you gathering that is not entirely clear to me yet as a user? I know that when I do a recording, there's a session that I can go back to later and check out. When I do just a random chat with it, I'm not sure if that's all getting stored or where it would be stored, because the sessions right now on the web seem to be just the actual audio and visual recording, right?

But the “Hey, here's my screen. Do something right now” functionality—is that also all being logged? Is there even more being logged beyond that that I haven't thought of yet?

Right now, when you use Cluely to record audio in meetings, it is actually not legal to have a running recording of someone and save that recording somewhere. But it is fully possible to have an AI note-taker that will transcribe the meeting and summarize it, essentially turning it into notes.

And that's what we do. We don't save the actual MP3 audio unless you're an enterprise user who's specifically requested that. We don't save that; we only save the AI summary of what happened during the meeting. Similarly, whenever you use Cluely to trigger a response, we save the response and the question that you asked it, but all the data is stored under an encryption layer, so we actually don't know which user is making which request.

Yeah. Interesting. Okay, cool. So I think this is both an interesting technology discussion, but perhaps even more so an interesting sociological discussion. And I do think you've done a masterful job of creating some provocative marketing and stories, and even just positioning yourself. I do appreciate that, by the way. I've always been a fan of provocative marketing strategies.

One of the more interesting things I've heard you say is that in the future, it will all be legal. I'd love to hear you unpack what you think the current rules, norms, and expectations are that people have of one another that, with time, will be looked back on as clearly anachronistic or clearly from an earlier time, and we'll all just agree that it was silly to ever have thought that way.

I have these various AI mantras. One of them is that the scarcest resource is a positive vision for the future. So, what is your positive vision for the future? I would give you all the time you need to flesh it out in as much detail as you can. What's life going to be like? Are we going to still be working? Are we going to be working less? Are we going to be all exploring nature while the AIs do all the work? Are we going to have universal basic income?

You're clearly thinking about major societal changes, but I would love to hear what's in it for the average everyday person who's not at the frontier right now. What sort of life should they expect and hopefully find compelling enough to be excited about?

Yeah, it's a hard question. The analogy would be going back 600 years in time and asking a blacksmith, "Here's a steam engine. Can you predict what the world will look like with a steam engine?" He couldn't possibly imagine that there would be data analysts in the future. The only thing he could see, which is quite short-sighted, would be, "Wow, this invention is going to completely automate away my job. People are not going to learn how to put the hammer to the metal, and they're going to lose core critical-thinking skills that define what it means to be human. They're going to lose out on the core manual labor that comes with blacksmithing. This is an art." He would think only negative things about it.

It would not be possible to understand the positive implications of technology. And I think this is something that most people are short-sighted about. In reality, if we do have a superintelligence and an AI that can cognitively do everything that a human can do, but better, this will inevitably result in faster scientific progress. Cancer is no longer a thing. Alzheimer's is no longer a thing. You and I don't die at 80 years old; we die at 800 years old, and our lives are infinitely expanded.

The whole concept of capital creation, and the idea of working to add value to society—to create capitalistic value for society—I think that will probably be removed as a concept. In reality, assume you had all the money in the world and, at the snap of your fingers, you could essentially gain anything you want, because that is the world we're looking at with superintelligence. You want a hamburger? You can snap your fingers, and an AI superintelligence will know how to optimally get you a hamburger in time. Anything you want is at your fingertips. What is there left to do?

And I think that sort of reveals the true human instincts. In this world, you won't be just some mindless puppet. You will be doing what you natively want to do, which means you don't just go out and get a coffee, and you don't go work a data analyst job 8 hours a day doing some mindless work that you hate. Instead, you go on a walk to get a coffee because you want to go out and walk and get a coffee. You run a coffee shop because you want to run a coffee shop. You go out and meet interesting people, talk about interesting things, philosophize about life, explore nature, and do all the things that you are naturally compelled to.

I think it is proven that even when AI automates difficult things, humans will still err toward doing difficult things, and we see that with chess. When the first chess bot came out that sort of solved chess, everyone thought, "Man, this is the death of chess." But in reality, chess is now more popular than ever because humans do not like to default to output for the sake of output. Our default states of desire do not evolve that way.

I think humans naturally do things because we naturally want to do things. Everyone has things that they naturally want to do. When the time comes for us to truly abstract away all that is unnecessary and only do the things that we truly enjoy doing, this will be completely different. Every single day, you will get to do the things that you want to do most. And all of the lazy grunt work that you don't want to do, you will not have to do unless you truly want to do it.

And I think it will be obvious that people will truly want to put effort into things. You will no longer find beauty in woodworking for the sake of having a final sculpture at the end. You will find beauty in the process of doing it, and you will do it because you intrinsically want to do it.

Another thing that I'm quite optimistic about with scientific progress is the ability to control and turn on and off what we find joy in. Right now, probably one of the big societal dangers is that everyone doomscrolls 4 hours a day, and you're just scrolling on this mindless algorithm, and you essentially are not gaining any skills. Your brain is literally decaying.

What if there was some sort of biological mechanism where you could literally flip a switch and no longer find dopamine from scrolling, and instead force yourself to find dopamine from, I don't know, reading English text from the 1800s? Every single person in the world would want that: the ability to choose what they find joy in.

And I guarantee you, 99% of humans would choose the ability to find joy in things that are not hedonism or mindless activities like going to a spa. People would want to do things like read literature, paint, make art, go for runs, live healthier lives, and garden. These are the things that we are naturally biologically inclined to want to do.

And truly, the end state where output is no longer a scarcity at all, and output is essentially infinite—you can have anything you want—I think many people are bearish on this, but this is as close as we can get to utopia. Of course, that is the scenario where superintelligence does come out. And if superintelligence does not come out, then everything everyone's been saying is just a joke, and AI just ends up defaulting to being a tool.

Maybe 10–20% of white-collar jobs get automated away, but essentially everyone just lives the same life and they're just 20% improved.

It sounds like you are quite AGI-pilled, a superintelligence believer, though.

Yes. I think it is inevitable that the future will come, if not now, a few years from now.

What role do you want to play? I find entrepreneurship in this context interesting, almost to the point of being paradoxical. I spent most of my career as an entrepreneur, and that's always been my instinct. And yet, I find that in this AI era, I'm a little less inclined toward it, partly because I'm thinking about where the moats are and all that kind of basic analysis, but also partly because I'm thinking, well, is it all just going to come out in the wash?

Is there the idea that I could build a generational company and have this long-term impact, maybe even something that outlives me? It feels like that's very, very hard to do in a future scenario where a superintelligence for all comes on the scene and everybody is living their best, most philosophical life. Right. What is the contribution that you want to make, and on what time scale? In a sense, who is it for? Is it for you? Is it for the public? In a world where everybody is in that state, in the end state, what difference does it make what you do between now and then?

I think, well, if that future isn't an eventuality, it's only because there are human beings tirelessly working to make that future an eventuality. But there are enough humans out there that it will inevitably come. I find it very exciting that I am helping society progress toward that future.

If my only contribution is expanding the user experience of this translucent glass-pane overlay for AI usage, then I will be very happy with that contribution. If my contribution can be much more, then I will be even happier. Right now, I think I'm living the most fulfilled life I could ever be living.

In a different world, I would be interning at Meta as some brain-dead software engineer, fearing for my job, career, and future prospects, and getting ready for summer classes in my junior year at Columbia. That is an existence I don't find fulfilling at all. Right now, this is probably the most exciting time in human history.

Really, nobody knows. Even these projections I'm telling you, take them with less than a grain of salt. Nobody knows what the future looks like in 5, 10, or 20 years. The only thing you can do is move in the direction that you believe is positive, and I truly believe I'm moving in the most positive direction for human society.

From my perspective, I am working toward a future where cancer is cured, Alzheimer's is cured, and we all live forever in the most optimal, idealistic life that we could ever want. That is a very positive future for me, and that's the future I'm chasing.

And the theory of change, just to make sure I'm passing the intellectual Turing test and can say it back to you, is basically this: by normalizing and creating the right mode of interaction for always-on AI assistance for everyone, your sense is that this is the way you can contribute to getting us to that future.

The more that people use AI, the more productive they will be. If this tool—if all it does is make everyone 10% more productive—then I will have single-handedly resulted in essentially 700 million human beings' worth of productivity in the world, which would be really great.

But I actually think this technology is way bigger than that. If it is more than that, and if it actually rapidly enhances AI adoption worldwide, then I think it will do much, much more than that. There will be more money funneled into AI research and development. There will be more of a common understanding: “Okay, we're all using AI. This isn't so bad. This is great.”

It will increase optimism for AI, increase usage and consumer adoption, and every single step that is required before we hit this utopic state, I think the spread of this tool will be singularly capable of helping with.

So tell me about your strategy. I don't know if this is a strategy from the beginning or if it's something you stumbled into, found had worked, and doubled down on, but even in just your last couple of responses, you took a couple of shots at the, let's say, mainline default respectable career path for young technologists.

What is it about hating on that that you think is so resonant? Why are people so drawn to, or so activated by, shots across the bow of the university or shots across the idea of taking what would normally be considered a pretty high-prestige job at Big Tech?

First, I think people always want to root for the underdog. Right now, I might be pretty viral, but I'm nowhere near as viral as the immortal legacy of an Ivy League or a tech institution.

But also, people naturally don't want to be a cog in the wheel. Nobody wants to grow up and live a life of meaningless capital production, where that's all they do and all they will ever do. Everyone wants to make an impact and a dent in the universe.

Everyone is attracted to the idea of starting their own thing because it would be great if they could make an impact on the universe and not be a cog in the wheel. I am probably a living example of what that could look like, and I think people my age are inspired and excited by the life that I am living and the alternative career path that I'm suggesting.

I don't think there have been very many people in this world who have been happy and completely content with just being some industrial cog. I also think that the glamour of school and jobs is getting lost among the newer generations.

We were all told growing up, “All you have to do is go to a good school, get good grades, and you'll get a good job, and you'll be safe.” But in reality, that's not what we're seeing. College graduates with a 30% unemployment rate is ridiculous.

You graduate from college, you do everything that you were told, and it is just not true. There's a seed of doubt in everyone's mind: “Hey, maybe everything the older generation told us was wrong. They put me in this terrible position where I ended up spending years and years of my life doing something that I hated, which was memorization and studying useless concepts, all in exchange for some semblance of stability.”

And now AI is here, unemployment rates are skyrocketing, and what can I do? I think there's a lot of frustration in my generation and an interest in choosing something different. There must be something better that I could have done.

I am a metaphorical and physical manifestation of the path not trodden.

It's interesting how broad that critique is. I'm certainly pretty sympathetic to a lot of it. The gerontocracy is not serving us super well in many different ways, I would say. But that wasn't a super-AI-specific account.

I know you've been kicked out for a little while now, but what's your report from the front on the university level in terms of what's going on with AI there? Obviously, students are using Claude and ChatGPT and stuff, but are the universities—Columbia specifically—starting to find their footing at all, or are they still taking a bury-your-head-in-the-sand approach?

They're letting the professors manage the classes as they please, and everyone has their own rules around AI. But I can tell you with 100% confidence that at least 95% to 99%, if not fully 100%, of all Columbia students have used AI to cheat on an exam or assignment before.

You would literally be weird if you said, “I've never used AI to cheat on an assignment before,” or for homework or something.

You would literally be seen as the odd one out, and I think schools and older generations have not caught on to how massive the AI hive mind has been for college students and people of my generation. Every single person who will grow into a high-profile job in the future has cheated using AI and used AI to realize the potential of AI to massively improve their output in school. I think people are not ready for what happens when these kids get 5 years older and are truly an AI-native generation.

I feel like there's an interesting distinction between homework and exams, and I just want to hear you unpack that a little bit more. When I was in school, we didn't have AI. Without revealing too much—well, a lady never reveals her age—but it's been a couple of years. There was a generally understood idea that, on the homework level, people would work in groups and talk to their classmates, and everybody would usually get mostly the right answers on the homework one way or another.

Right, right.

And so it doesn't strike me as too different from a sort of code-of-conduct standpoint that you might consult AI, since you were already consulting the smartest person you knew in the class. On the other hand, when you showed up to take an exam, we didn't really have means of cheating. I think cheating was pretty rare. Do you think cheating is actually common on exams in today's world, or is it more at the homework level that you're seeing people use it?

Yeah, it depends. I think there are different sorts of exams. For a writing class, the exam might be a take-home essay, and I guarantee you most people are brainstorming, drafting, outlining, and making edits with AI. That is functionally over.

But for the actual exam where you go into a classroom, sit down, and take an exam, A, I think the actual format is outdated and probably in 5 years we won't see this again—ever, anywhere in America. But B, I think the regulations on that have been as stringent as they have always been, and it is very hard to cheat on those. But I think it's just an outdated format and probably will be obsolete very soon.

I've seen a bunch of different accounts online, and I don't want to spend too much time on this because there's a bunch of stuff online about it already, but how would you briefly tell the story of how and why you got kicked out of Columbia?

Earlier in the fall semester of this year, I had entertained the idea of working at a big tech job. To get a job at a big tech company, you need to pass a programming riddle interview, and they'll essentially ask you the programming equivalent of, “How many hairpins will fit in the Empire State Building?” It's pretty ridiculous because the questions are all online, so it ends up becoming not a question of critical thinking, but a question of how many hours you've spent memorizing these riddles. It's pretty stupid, pretty obsolete, and quite simple: just take a picture of the riddle, ask ChatGPT what the answer to the riddle is, and get the answer.

That's exactly what I built: a tool called Interview Coder, which is invisible. The UI looks extremely similar to Cluely. It's a pane of glass that appears over your screen and is invisible to screen share, so the interviewer doesn't know that you're using AI. It will take a picture of the screen and give you the answer to the programming riddle.

I record myself publicly using this tool to get an offer at Amazon. I used it through the entire interview process, and I completely fooled the interviewer into thinking that I wasn't using AI. I posted it on YouTube, and it went very, very viral. An Amazon interviewer sees it, and an Amazon executive sees it. They report it to Columbia, essentially saying, “Hey, if you don't expel this kid, we're never going to hire from your school again.” It was a very thinly veiled threat. Columbia hears this and drags me into a loop of unnecessary disciplinary hearings that ultimately end in my suspension from the school.

Interesting. I'll have to request comment from Amazon on the threat concept, but we do know that the Columbia administration is at least somewhat willing to cave to a threat. I've seen that on multiple dimensions.

At that point, was it basically over for you? Were you offered a chance to recant or apologize, or was it kind of, “This is just beyond the pale; we just can't have it?”

I was offered chances to apologize, but I think I would have rather died than apologize at that moment. I thought what I was doing was obvious. Not only was it essentially the equivalent of how a computer science major conducts a protest, but it also was, I think, generally a way that the future will trend.

I think it's ridiculous that I'm not allowed to use AI on a programming assignment when, in the job, I'll be using AI to write 90% of the code anyway. That's the number Google is reporting. I thought that I was probably one of the few people in the world capable of perhaps leading this revolution. That might be a bit high-horse of me to say, but this change in the industry—I'm the best person in the world to take a meaningful stab at it.

If I apologized right then and there, it would just dilute the story, and I would not internally feel proud of myself for doing that.

How would you describe your own personal code of ethics as it relates to AI? I have some subquestions there, but maybe start off with the broad one.

I guess I live principally by a theory of AI maximalism. I think every single chance I have to use AI where it helps me, I should use AI where it is helpful. If an AI can do a task today, then you would have to be really stupid not to think that it could do that task in 5 years. The models we use today are the stupidest models we will ever use for the rest of our lives. If you adopt that framework, then you realize that a lot of the work I'm doing, I should not have to be doing right now because an AI is capable of doing it. I live by this individually, but I also think that everyone in the world should adopt this framework.

I'm also an AI maximalist generally. I feel like I'm always trying to do 2 things at once, one of which is accomplishing the object-level task in front of me, and the other is figuring out how much—and how—AI can actually help me accomplish that task.

I definitely share that. Is there a limit to it, though? In thinking about this, I recalled the Overemployed subreddit, which existed before AI and is perhaps its own indictment of certain big tech companies. The thread is full of people telling stories of how they got multiple remote jobs at tech companies and tried to do the minimum to avoid getting fired from both of them, just collecting multiple comp packages—and, of course, generally doing this without telling the companies. Does that feel okay? If you're smart enough to hold down multiple big tech jobs with your AI assistant and be more productive than the other employees?

100%. The companies themselves don't care. They're hiring you to eventually get to some level of output, and if you're performing at that level of output, then why should they care about your input? That's also the framework that we adopt here. We don't set any strict hours on anything, but we do set strict output requirements, and the output requirements are quite high. I think everybody works hard to fulfill the output.

But if anybody could do this amount of output in an hour, then you would not need to do any more output. You would not need to come into the office for any longer. Overemployment is a fine thing. It is the fault of the company, and it is the onus of the company to make sure that their employees are performing at a level that they are happy with.

And if you're happy with it, then you shouldn't care about hours.

I know that right now Cluely is this sort of real-time pane-of-glass assistant. I don't know what it might evolve into, but one could imagine, if you are a maximalist and trying to help people get the maximum output—including potentially holding down remote jobs with as little input as possible thanks to AI—you could imagine just taking the human out of the loop entirely. Or maybe I have 8 Cluelys running on 8 laptops, one for each of my 8 jobs, and at some point the AI is just doing the job.

With today's AIs, it's probably doing a not-so-great job, but it can respond to emails. Maybe it at least allows me to not get fired for long enough to make it economically attractive to try to pull this off. I guess, is that the direction that you would imagine going?

And then one thing that people are going to start to do, I think, pretty soon is try to interrogate entities and figure out: Are you an AI? Are you a human? Are you some sort of hybrid? What is it that I'm dealing with here? One of the more interesting proposals I've heard for short and sweet, but I think powerful, AI regulation is an idea advanced by Yuval Noah Harari: AI must always identify itself as AI.

I wonder what you think about that rule, first of all. If society wanted to put such a rule in place, would you support it? And do you imagine pushing the product frontier to the point where this question of whether the AI will identify itself as AI actually becomes a real, live issue for you in terms of how much people can push the cheating frontier?

Yeah, I don't think that's the solution. I think we're already seeing AI output and human output converging. When you use AI to help draft an essay, are you required to say, “This is AI-generated”? What if you just use it to add the final editing touches or help you outline? At what point is it AI-generated, and at what point is it human-generated?

I think a much better framework for thinking about it is that AI is a tool that will help you make more output, in whatever capacity that means. If you think about it that way, I don't say, “This hat was made by a Chinese worker, that was made by silicon, and that was made by...” You can get infinitely regressive with the blame. I think the only thing that should matter for everybody involved is output. It should be up.

If you go on a great date—even the most extreme example—you go on a great date and have a great time. That is the output, and if the output of that is satisfactory, then what happens? What if you went on an AI-on-AI date? Even in cases like that, you shouldn't have an AI be forced to announce itself as an AI.

I think it's pretty ridiculous, partially because it's completely unenforceable and also partially because truly the only thing that matters is output. I think it's really hard for me to think of jobs that an AI could automate that a human would be more internally, intrinsically fulfilled in doing. For example, customer service support calls—that is a shockingly big use case for AI.

Humans are currently able to do customer support calls, but is there a person in the world who wakes up excited to go to a job where they are just doing customer service? I would argue probably not. They probably have a lot more fun and live a much better life if they were doing maybe literally anything else. I think, of course, an AI should be able to do that.

I just think in the world there's way too much focus on input and way too little focus on output, and there's also way less thought on what happens when output increases 10x. When output increases 10x, I just think it will be a better future for everybody.

Yeah, that's fascinating. So, putting your own dating hat on—and if you're on the market for romance these days—but if you went on a date and your date was later revealed to have been using an AI assistant that was telling him or her what to say at every given point, do you feel like that's fine, no big deal? Are you envisioning a world in which spouses just say to each other what the AI is telling them to say to each other?

It starts to feel a little dystopian at some point, right? I think people have a sense that it's not exactly all about the output. It is also that people care about where it comes from. It's like the idea that it's the thought that counts, right? That's an old adage that people are like, “Yeah, my kid may not have made a great piece of art for Father's Day, but they made some art for Father's Day, and it's the thought that counts.”

Google had this kind of “step in it” moment, right? I'm sure you recall this, where, during the Olympics, they had an ad that showed the story of a little girl who wants to write to her hero, who's an Olympian, and the dad's like, “This letter's got to be perfect.” Everybody was like, “That's totally the wrong way to think about it. It doesn't need to be perfect. It's about the kid expressing themselves, figuring out who they are and what they care about.”

I do feel like there's an intrinsic preference that still feels right. I don't think it's just the old-man romantic in me saying, “Are we really making everything better if we judge it purely on outputs and have the AI do it?” It seems like there are some areas where that preference still matters.

I think, at one point, things filter down, and I actually agree with you on this. There are some conversations and some things that you value only for the sentimental value, or it's just that some human put effort into it. I think those things can coexist in a world where AI sort of automates away all tasks.

I think the dad with the image example is a perfect example, actually. AI can generate an image that is great, and if you ever needed an image—if you ever cared about the output of having a proper image—then you can already do that with AI. The technology already exists. Yet the child decides to do it, and it makes the moment all the more meaningful.

I would argue that is a very, very human experience that can exist in a world of complete AI superiority. I think those are actually the only things that will matter. It's the moments and the things that require effort that we intrinsically value.

This is sort of the world that I was picturing: When all output is immediate and complete, and the path to getting anything is obfuscated, we will still find value in the meaningful things that we ourselves put effort into. A child will still want to draw despite being able to have an AI automatically spawn a beautiful painting.

It doesn't matter because I would argue that that's probably a case where the output is something different from just a tangible, good drawing. I would argue that the actual output you're wanting there is human input, and that is something that AI will never be able to completely obfuscate away. If that makes sense.

Yeah, I think so. It sounds like there is a distinction that you're making between things that are done for economic production purposes, in which case we really care about outputs, and then there are things that are done for what you could call sentimental value, and I call connection—the overarching narrative of who we are and how we exist together and all of that sort of stuff.

It sounds like we would acknowledge that if my kid used AI and tried to pass it off as their own work in giving me a Father's Day gift, that would be a form of cheating that you would say is, in some sense, still going to be a norm violation in the future because it wasn't supposed to be about that. It wasn't just about the output in the first place.

So, in that cheating, there's still something that I guess I should be upset about. When my kid is a dad and their kid tries to pass off an AI-generated Father's Day card as a hand-drawn thing, should my kid be upset at their kid, or should they just be like, “Well, this is kind of the new world that we live in”?

I guess it's like: What are you actually judging the output on? It's obviously not the talent demonstrated in the painting. It's the level of input that you put in. And I think then that's just a bad judgment; it's poor output, is what it is.

But generally, for most things that are economically productive—strictly economically productive—having an AI automate them away and not reveal itself to be AI is just a positive for humanity, really. I guarantee you wouldn't care if your shipping was all done by robots. You ordered a T-shirt, and instead of being made by Chinese child workers, it was instead made by a robot. You'd probably be pretty happy with that, in fact.

And then there's just an AI automating itself. There's no need for it to, at every step of the process, say, “An AI or a robot did this. This was not done by a human.” It doesn't matter.

But certainly there are some tasks where you value the human input, and the actual output is the human input. I think those will be evergreen and continue to last even in a world of AI, and these will actually be the only things that we do—the only things that we do of any value or spend any meaningful time on—is the kid drawing a drawing to give to their father.

Yeah, I'm with you, by the way, on most of this, if not all of it. I think people who are in the AI discourse are so often extremely fortunate in terms of the employment that they have and how much they enjoy the work that they get paid to do. And I think it's a very healthy reminder that a very significant—probably a supermajority—of people, even in a well-off country like the United States, if given the option to not have to work for that money anymore, would absolutely take that. I do sometimes ask people that question, and depending on who I ask, sometimes people just look at me like I'm crazy.

They're like, “You're telling me—just to make sure, right?—the deal you're offering me is I get the money, I don't have to do the job?” They're like, “Yeah, I'd take it.” It's like, you sound crazy asking it in a lot of corners. So I'm with you on that. I do think there's—and I'm pretty bullish also on—just how adaptable people will be when it comes to finding new things to fulfill themselves and new sources of meaning, so on and so forth. In the utopian scenario, I think all that stuff is probably—yeah, there's more anxiety around it than I tend to think is probably merited. Of course, the transition from here to there is probably going to be pretty choppy, and that's where hopefully we can make good decisions.

In practical terms, where does it pay to cheat today, and where would you say it fails? I guess, unpacking that question slightly, one of the things that people presumably are concerned about, if they're university administrators or if they're hiring junior software developers, is that they're kind of like, “Look, we get it, right? The coding test that we give you is not fully representative. It's not maxing out your skills. We get that. However, it's a proxy metric that we have that we use, and we need something. We can't hire you for a year to do the job and then decide whether to hire you. So we've got to have some reduction in scope, and so we need something there to try to measure, gauge, assess. And if you're cheating on that, then we basically lose signal, and we don't know what you're going to be able to do in the actual job.”

So I guess there are a couple of different angles on that question. The first one is just: in what areas does AI cheating actually get you into a place where you can then be successful, and in what other domains, if you cheated through the initial hurdles, would you find yourself way over your head and end up failing because the AI can't actually help you with the real thing?

I think this sort of goes back to the whole idea that output is the only thing that matters. I think there are 2 responses to this. A, I think assignments should be obsolete, and all your work should be judged—or your entire competency should be judged—based on the output you have generated in the past.

My second point is a little bit more complicated, but generally, yeah, I think the whole concept of a programming riddle should be obsolete. Instead, I should have open-sourced all of the work that I've ever done in the past. You should be able to look through all my code, and if not you directly, an AI should be able to look through all the code that I've ever written or all the projects that I've ever done in my life. Then it should be able to tell you with exact certainty, “Hey, this guy is a proficient TypeScript developer, and he's lacking in this and this. He's overall a 76 out of 100 candidate.” That should be how assignments are done in the future.

Either a human or an AI judges you strictly based on the output of your work in the past, and that is used to determine the output of your work in the future. Anything else will be obsolete—or perhaps not obsolete, but generally, any assignment that can be done by an AI should not be asked anymore.

That would be response 1, and response 2 is, I think, when you start with the framework of thinking about output, let's suppose that my goal here is to make Google and I am free to use any AI tools at my disposal. There's only so far that an AI code editor can take me in the task of developing Google. If it can take me all the way, then beautiful. But realistically, it can't. At some point, the AI will not have enough knowledge, as the model stands right now.

Then my task—what cheating, using AI to make Google, looks like—is actually going back and manually backfilling all the information that I might need to build Google, the things that the AI can't do. Perhaps that will go as far back as learning addition and basic multiplication, then getting to matrix multiplication, then getting to the particular linear algebra that is the Google PageRank algorithm. Perhaps it is all of that, but most likely it won't be. There will be an AI that can fill in the gaps, that can fill in many of the gaps for me.

Oftentimes, the way to cheat—even if you adopt a cheat-on-everything philosophy—is that there will still be things that you have to learn. And I guess that is why cheat-on-everything, I think, is a valid moral framework. If you try to do everything the fastest way that you possibly can, there will still be some things that the AI cannot do.

For you to make that last jump, it might require 4 years of learning before you can make that last jump on your own. And even if you wanted to cheat, you could not cheat there. But I still think it is a good framework. You should take every jump you possibly can before you reach a jump that technology cannot get you to. In that case, you should take all the necessary steps to backfill the prerequisite skills that it takes to complete the last jump, if that makes any sense. Cheat-on-everything and learning foundational skills—both of those coexist in the world that I propose.

Yeah, similar. I always am looking for these short, pithy mantras. Mine on this point has been: you want to learn how to do hard things, but not necessarily the hard way. And I think that's a pretty similar philosophy to what you're saying.

I don't really know where I come down on this, but do you give any credence to the idea that kids need to learn to write essays in an unassisted way as a generally important foundational step? I'm genuinely uncertain about this, but we have tools that make many things not strictly necessary, and yet there is some fundamental strength-building that feels important, right?

In the physical realm, we have cars and we have boats, but it's still pretty helpful to run and swim, just to build up the physical capacity to do that. It's part of being a strong person. Do you think that there are things that are just important to building a strong mind that kids need to do, or that could even be important into adulthood? I don't necessarily limit it to kids or young people, but are there things there that you think are potentially important that we might run the risk of losing if people become AI maximalists too enthusiastically?

I think generally people should be output-oriented and goal-oriented. When kids get together and decide, “I'm going to build a sandcastle,” they see the vision of the sandcastle in their head, and they enjoy working toward the vision. They will learn a bunch of random skills as they're building toward the sandcastle. This is objectively a good thing.

I can only imagine that, if I was 7 years old and my goal was, “Man, I really want to learn how to write like that. I just read Harry Potter. This was amazing. It was a great book. I want to learn how to write like that,” then if you gave me nothing but a pen and paper, I'd probably have a really hard time. I'd probably get maybe 2 pages of 7-year-old-generated writing before I realized, “Oh, I'm not J. K. Rowling. I can't write this great book.”

But imagine you gave that 7-year-old AI, and all of a sudden I can generate a million different story ideas. I can have AI draft a million different things, and all of a sudden I can explore different pipelines. Maybe I will actually come to something very interesting. As I'm writing, I will realize, “Hey, this is exactly as good as J. K. Rowling's,” or, “Hey, the plot—I feel like the Harry Potter story was a lot cooler in this way. I can go in this direction.”

I guarantee you I will have learned more from doing that exploration than I would have if you just gave me pen and paper by firelight and told me, “Write a story that is comparable to Harry Potter.” I will have learned different skills. Maybe my grammatical knowledge is a little less. I don't exactly know when to put a semicolon. But I will have the ability to recreate Harry Potter; that would be my goal.

This is something I've seen from my life experience, something that I tried doing in 7th grade—or when I was 7—and I can only imagine that if I had AI, I would have learned so much more.

And perhaps I wouldn't have learned the same foundational skills, but I would have learned a lot more foundational skills. If you have a child, I bet you would be excited to see them try this too. You would have loved to see them, rather than use pen and pencils, try to write a novel. Just play around with AI and see how cool of a story they can make. Everybody agrees that you would probably learn more foundational skills doing that.

Yeah, I think I'm very aligned with you. We just did an episode not long ago with Mackenzie Price, who's the founder of Alpha School, and they're doing all AI instruction in 2 hours a day. Then the afternoon is just all about these exploratory projects. Kids are going all kinds of different directions, often with AI as a copilot or assistant to them in their adventures.

And, yeah, I mean, I'm probing for what the possible downside of that may be, and I suspect we will identify some over time. But I do agree that the output seems likely to be much bigger, and that's not to be ignored, for sure.

I wonder what other externalities this sort of technology might create, and specifically around the sort of cheating positioning. One thing that I do worry about in society in general is a general trend toward lower and lower trust. It seems like that is a condition that predates AI, but also might make it more of a problem.

Even in online discourse, there's always the question, “Am I arguing with an AI right now?” That's also one of the reasons I think an “AI must identify itself” rule is potentially good, because here I am thinking I'm engaging in discourse, trying to move my fellow voters, and trying to help steer society in a positive direction. That's the way I'm thinking about the output, but the Russian troll farm on the other end of the equation is thinking about the output in terms of sucking up my time and making me disillusioned or whatever.

Obviously, the Russian troll farm isn't necessarily going to follow the rules anyway, so that's not a perfect example, perhaps. But do you worry about loss of trust? Do you worry about some markets that exist today coming under stress? I was thinking also about when I go on to Fiverr, for example, or Upwork, and I look at somebody halfway around the world. Today, I feel like I can trust, to a degree, my back-and-forth with them and whatever, but in the future, if they're kind of cheating on that, I'm like, “Oh, God, I don't know. What can I make of this? Can I even—is it even worth it to me to go into such a market?”

So, yeah: externalities, loss of trust, any particular markets that you think might be adversely affected by this sort of thing? If you were to take the Kantian “universalize the maxim” approach, are there places where it fails?

Yeah, I would propose a different sort of example. Imagine I'm speaking with someone from Mexico. They only speak Spanish and I only speak English, and I can use AI to live-translate everything that they're doing and essentially assist me in the conversation that way. Is that a loss of trust? Probably not. You'd probably look at that and think, probably not.

Now let's take that a small step further. Imagine I'm talking with a consultant who knows a lot about, say, the coal-mining space, and I know nothing about the coal-mining space, and we're trying to have an even conversation about the coal-mining space. As we're talking, I have clearly pulled up definitions so that I know exactly what he's talking about when he's talking about the Amherst mining incident of 1982, and I have extra context about the conversation. Now we can have a deeper conversation about whatever it is he's actually trying to get at.

Is that actually losing trust in the conversation? Is that a loss of trust? I would argue probably not. It's just something that helps the conversation get to a point where, beyond the random need for memorization of facts and all this stuff, we're getting at something.

I think people are worried about a time when AI is more human than humans. I think this is just the incorrect worry. They worry about a time when an AI is able to romance their girlfriend or enjoy itself better than humans, and then tell you you'll have more fun if you go to the pool right now than if you go to the beach.

But I think an AI will never be able to do this, because these are all our own preferences and opinions. The ultimate meaning of what it is to be human is to decide the things that you want to do. I think an AI will never actually be able to make those decisions for you. It will just be able to infinitely make it easier to make those decisions.

To get back to the conversation of whether we are losing trust as a society, I think there are so many cases where trust is not being eroded. Rather, we're getting to the actual core, philosophical meaning of the conversation, or what you are actually trying to talk about. You have an enriched conversation thanks to AI.

As AI usage grows and grows, the conversations will boil down to the deepest, most human essence of the conversation: What is it you were actually trying to say? Why are you here in a conversation with me? At some point, 2 humans made the conscious decision to engage in a conversation with each other and to talk about something.

Perhaps the discourse is, “Hey, what year did World War II start?” and AI tells you the answer. Maybe that's where the discourse goes. But I don't think that's actually discourse at all. AI serves best in giving you information and helping you decide the core tastes, thoughts, and opinions that you have.

At the very core, the impetus of everything is your human decision and your human impulse. I think society will just trend toward expecting that people are using AI, but AI will never ever replace the “You think this girl is pretty; go talk to her.” I make that decision.

It's unclear to me to what degree you cheated with the initial example there of real-time English-to-Spanish translation. I did not too long ago tweet something about the Google Meet demo that they showed at I/O, which was a real-time simultaneous translation. I do think that is one of the most purely aspirational AI product implementations that I've ever seen, because it's just been a human impulse or desire—a dream for so long—to overcome language barriers. They have something here that is actually making it real.

As you were talking there, I was reflecting on how I should feel under different situations: You brought that up purely randomly, and it just happens to be a coincidence that I also have specifically cited that example as something I'm excited about, versus what if you really did your homework on me and scrolled back through my Twitter feed and saw it, versus what if Cluely just popped it up right now?

I think in this example, I don't know that I really care that much. In a way, maybe I prefer the purely serendipitous one. Between you taking the time to go do your homework and the AI helping you pop that up at runtime, I don't know. I think that probably comes down to: it's output-oriented.

That's a good point. Yeah, I mean, the situation right now—the reason you prefer the serendipitous way is because, as you understand it, the way that information is gathered is by going through and doing research on you manually via Twitter. It's not yet universal and commonplace that I could use an AI to just pull that information up.

But that's because of your understanding that knowing X knowledge means Y effort. As soon as that logical train of thought is broken, then in the future you probably wouldn't think that.

For example, it probably meant a lot to someone to get a beautifully typed-up, almost calligraphy-looking letter from someone, because they know that if letters are beautiful, that means someone put a lot of effort into making the letters beautiful. But today that means nothing, because your default assumption is that they probably just typed this up.

I think in the future, when there are more powerful AIs that are capable of doing exactly what Cluely does, you will start to disassociate these things and start to make different connections. Perhaps it is not a knowledge of your Twitter algorithm that suggests effort being put into researching you. It is perhaps, I don't know, a deeper knowledge about something personal that you might have only told me in person. That would be suggestive of a level of effort.

But when you break that one link, it doesn't actually undermine the entire idea that I appreciate it when people put effort into me. It just disconnects that one specific link.

Going back a second to the question of assessments, I thought you had a pretty interesting idea there. If my concern as a hiring company is, “I need something that I can do in a manageable amount of time to get a sense for this person's skill level,” your answer to that is: use AI to go much deeper, and it's on the person to show you a lot more of who they are.

I think that's pretty interesting and maybe could really work. Do you feel, though, like that's asking too much of people in some way? I mean, it's common, of course, in the software world to have an open-source profile and whatever, but it's a lot harder for a lot of other things, right? If I'm a salesperson, I can't open-source all the deals I've ever done. There are just so many different contexts.

One concern we might have about AI and society in general is that it may sort of track us prematurely. If we become overly informed about every other person's history and we kind of know everywhere they've been and everything they've done and how well they've done it, it potentially starts to prevent people from up-leveling and switching from Track A to Track B because their long-term narrative, as understood by AI, is on this particular course. Why would we take a bet on them to change it?

Whereas in today's world, I can kind of mothball my old LinkedIn profile and reposition myself as a new kind of professional. If I can pass the assessments, I can kind of get in. I don't know. I'm always looking for these trade-offs. Any thoughts on that?

Yeah. If the AI does get to a point where it can track everything you've done, judge all your output, and quantitatively determine how good you would be as a customer support rep at Verizon, then that AI will also be smart enough to hopefully have regulations on that, or at least be able to determine what regulations would be most optimal for society in terms of what information we're able to know about each other.

Alternatively, let's assume that the models don't get much smarter and they're only as capable as they are now. I still think that the current system is very, very flawed, where you try to shove every single bit of your professional experience onto a 1-page résumé, and that gets sent to a human who subjectively judges it. Their laziness, their mood, the time of day—there are a million external factors. You could have lied about your résumé. There are so many things that make the current hiring process extremely inefficient.

I think that right now, a better thing exists. Probably, you could just—and I'm pretty sure this is sort of what we're doing at Cluely—but there's a different type of résumé where you can just sort of speak to an AI about the things that you're good at. An AI judges your relevant skills based on what the employer puts in. For example, the employer says, “I really care about the guy's cadence, his ability to speak, and his ability to persuade me.” The AI just throws a bunch of random questions at you, gives you a personalized assessment, and evaluates you based on that, plus your description of all the things that you've done in the past, plus an attempt to go deep and try to figure out and verify that you've done the things you say you've done.

I think almost anything is better than what we have right now, partly because it's too gameable and partly because an AI can do it better.

Let's change gears to your marketing. You are producing a lot of viral content. It is often quite cinematic in its look. How are you doing that? I assume you're an AI maximalist in marketing, too.

Yeah. I actually think we have almost an entire in-house film studio. We have videographers, a really nice camera, lighting, editors—we have everything that's needed to almost produce a movie in-house. We don't use AI because AI is not yet capable of doing the level of videography and editing that we ourselves are personally capable of doing. Again, the only thing that matters is the output here.

What we can use AI for, and what we often use AI for, is storyboarding exactly what every video looks like and helping us draft scripts that will be funny and comedic. But how we actually come across these ideas—I think this is just a bunch of 20- and 21-year-olds who've spent 4 hours a day scrolling on Instagram and TikTok. We're sufficiently brain-rotted enough to know what lands, what is funny, and what is the funniest 30-second video that you could see.

I think most of these tech bros are just so nerdy. They don't scroll. They pride themselves on not scrolling; they pride themselves on literally being intellectual and not funny. As a result, having spent the last 20 years of my life on Instagram, I know what's funny way better than these tech bros do. Or at the very least, I know what's engageable better than they do.

And all that's left is that now I've just been blessed with the money to make it controversial and cinematic. I think the second benefit of something being cinematic is that people pause and will watch it way more if there's a sense that, “Oh, someone put effort into this thing.”

Are you not a tech bro? I think from the outside-world perspective, you're a tech bro, right?

Yeah. I consider myself of a different ilk. I think I am more of a bro than I am a tech bro.

What's the difference?

I mean, the difference is, I think a tech bro is a specific type of nerd who sits in front of a computer, codes all day, and talks about AI, SaaS, and all this. In reality, I feel like I'm much more of a bro. I'm more human, and I'm more tech-agnostic.

Well, I have no idea why you're assigning me random personality descriptions, but the world will probably see me as a tech bro. I think no tech bro would see me as a tech bro.

I might have a proposal for you from my company, Waymark, which we've just launched: Waymark Cinematic. Our core product is an AI video creator for small businesses, and it wouldn't hit on the level that you guys are shipping at, but it does actually work really well for local and small businesses in their local communities.

With all the new stuff that has come out, we recently launched a managed-service line, Waymark Cinematic, and I would be very interested to see if we can use AI tools to hit your level. We just did one with the company Better featuring an AI Jake Paul. It's funny. Part of the reason I started this company and created an AI video maker for small businesses is because I myself am not good at this sort of thing, so I very much had to partner with people who really know it.

I would be interested to see if our creative team could use an AI process and create something that might actually fit in with the cinematic universe that you're creating.

I would be very curious to see that, too.

Yeah. How about the influencer marketing game? I haven't honestly seen too much of this content myself. In just preparing for this, I saw comments online from people saying, “All I'm seeing is clearly UGC campaigns.”

So is this another area—I assume you're indifferent to AI influencers versus real human influencers versus hybrids—but what's your kind of approach to the affiliate market?

I will also say that there are 2 big types of consumer marketing that are done on Instagram and TikTok. One is influencer marketing, and the other is UGC. There are many types, but those are sort of the 2 most popular ones.

With UGC, you just have some random 20-year-old. These videos are not 10 seconds—not even 10 seconds long. These accounts are completely fresh, and the only thing that you want to get out of it is, “This feels like a real person talking.” They'll come up with some viral hook, and they'll just talk about your product.

It's really simple—maybe 2 sentences of dialogue for the whole thing. It will be ridiculously simple, and it will be 10 seconds. But these are the videos that generate 5 million views and are the most-converting videos that we have on our platform.

For you, we know exactly which UGC hooks will grab the attention of 20-year-olds in college. We have this down to a science. We know exactly what sticks, what works best, what converts best, and all the available metrics.

But the reason you don't see it on your timeline is because the hooks aren't catered to you. You're not the ICP for the hooks. The ICP for the hooks is 16- to 20-year-olds who are in school. As a result, for some people, it will literally be like they cannot get this off their timelines because we've nailed the ICP so much.

For some people like you, it will just be, “I've never seen this particular UGC campaign.” But you will see some of our other campaigns because, believe me, we are going to take over the internet.

All right. We'll definitely watch out for that. I pride myself on staying reasonably connected to youth culture, so it sounds like I've got a little work to do to steer the algorithm and get me into the Cluely demographic.

I mean, we talked about the pane of glass. You shared a vision for how you think you're kind of on the same page as Apple, with this sort of overlay AI experience. My general sense of your trajectory is, if I understand it correctly, that you can't sustain the sort of insurgent position forever, right?

Yeah. If you're right, things that are cheating now won't be seen as cheating later.

Like, this stuff won't resonate in the future. So, is the idea that you are going to blitz-scale as much and as fast as possible on the asymmetric advantage that you have now to push past what the polite companies like Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI can do, achieve market share, and then mature alongside them? They will also bend your way as norms resettle, and then you'll be competing with them on a less asymmetric basis long-term. How do you see that long-term future unfolding for you?

Yeah, this is actually the future that I'm less certain about, because everything depends on how much of corporate culture we're able to change with our marketing right now. I think already you are seeing tremors of how the launch video affects our culture. All of a sudden, launches are becoming way more cinematic. People are trying to crack the controversial thing way more.

If this actually becomes more than just a wave in the water and becomes an actual gigantic thing, and all of a sudden corporate professionalism is dead and no longer appreciated, then I think we will carry this rebellious counterculture, “I'm going to do whatever I want” attitude with us well into the company's maturity.

But if it is the case that this is just a bump that lets us hit escape velocity, while it's still standard among all companies that you be professional, corporate, and buttoned-up, perhaps there's a future where we button up. All of this is downstream of whether our marketing takes us to escape velocity. Then the only question is: will our marketing taking us to escape velocity change the game of marketing forever for everyone? If it does, then we'll keep it going, and if it doesn't, then we'll button up.

And I guess to answer the point of whether that specific “we are the rebel, punching up” thing will fade as we become the dominant player in the market, I actually don't think that it's us being the little guys punching up right now that people are so captivated by. I just think, generally, the marketing—whether it was me that did all this marketing, whether it was Sam A or Ewan that did all this marketing—would be just as controversial and engaging.

I don't actually think that the core reason people are engaging with us is because we're the underdogs. In fact, I think to many people we are no longer the underdogs after we did the big raise. I think the reason it's resonating with people is because it's, more than anything, super transparent. I think everything I do seems controversial, but in reality, this is just me being honest.

Even in cases where I'm not being super controversial, like sometimes I'll be on Twitter and make a heartfelt post saying, “I respect you a lot,” that is also just me being honest. I think all the controversial stuff that I do is just a transparent slice of my life and my thoughts, and I just happen to have polarizing opinions. But I don't actually think we aim to be super polarizing. We just aim to be honest.

You mentioned the raise, and I've also seen you comment online that you're hiring with compensation packages up to $1 million plus equity. Tell me what you're looking for for $1 million plus equity, and maybe just a little bit about your experience trying to hire at the very high end of the AI talent pool right now.

Yeah, I feel like people are so wrong about this right now. Revenue time is just so compressed. VC money flows quite freely, and if you are actually making a meaningful attempt at swinging big, there will be someone to fund you to do it.

Everyone seems to agree that the best way to swing big is by having the best talent. For some reason, people are still trying to pay the bottom end of the compensation ranges for some stupid reason, like, “Oh, you need to be bought in by the company.” Bro, nobody knows about your company because you were founded 2 months ago. Why would anybody go die for your company?

You need to give them something to come in for, and then once they're in the company, that's when you have to convince them that you guys are the ones who are going to win. You have to convince them to have utmost loyalty. Right now, there's not an employee here who would sell a dollar of their equity because they're so convinced that the company's going to grow massively.

This all happens downstream of us being willing to pay at the top end of the compensation packages and convince them on culture. Nobody knows your company culture if they have not been there for a month. And if they have been there for a month, then they should be employed.

So, I guess my experience paying at the top end of the compensation packages is that it allows for a really strong top of funnel. Even if the most money-hungry person comes in saying, “I'm only here for the cash,” they'll come in, and I promise you they'll be captivated by the culture. They will not bring themselves to leave because it is fun.

This company is more fun than any other company in the world. We literally exist like a frat house. We have conversations late at night. We eat steak together. We go to the gym together. We talk about girls together. We talk about dudes together. This is a fun, exciting, fulfilling life.

Even if you might have come in for the $1 million-a-year compensation package, you will stay because you cannot do anything other than Cluely. It is the most fun you will ever have in your adult life.

Generally, I think there's surprisingly a lot of noise among programmers. We're looking for really competent full-stack engineers, and there's a lot of people who are really good at research or really good at low-latency optimizations, but that's not the thing that we're looking for.

That's something that has surprised me since trying to hire: there's a lot of people with really great backgrounds, but it's just a background in the wrong thing. As it turns out, we are actually looking for a very specific type of engineer who is capable of a very specific type of task. I think that answers your questions.

This has been fascinating, and I appreciate the earnest and minimally AI-assisted conversation, although I wouldn't have minded if you had been relying on Cluely from time to time. I know you were, at least at the beginning. Any other thoughts you want to leave people with before we break?

It's the most interesting time in human history. I think you should take more risks, and right now the riskiest move is probably what you determine to be the safest move.

Yeah, food for thought. Roy Lee, founder and CEO of Cluely, thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution.

Awesome, man. Thanks for having me.