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Iru Ekpunobi: He built an AI tool to "Cheat on everything." Then he got kicked out of Columbia and ended up with millions of dollars from investors. This year, we took a look at AI on a New York City campus. From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Iru Ekpunobi in for Janae Pierre. This week, we're looking back at some of our favorite stories of 2025.

Roy: I'm Roy. I got kicked out of Columbia University for building a tool to cheat on technical interviews. Now I'm building a tool to cheat on everything using AI.

Iru Ekpunobi: Earlier this year, WNYC's Ryan Kailaith reported on Roy Lee. Roy was a Columbia University student who was suspended after creating an AI-powered tool meant to help people get through coding job interviews. The app went viral, and before long, Silicon Valley investors were lining up with millions of dollars in funding. Our host, Janae Pierre, spoke with Ryan, and they talked about why this project drew such strong reactions. Also, how common AI use has become on campuses and why universities are still having a hard time figuring out where to draw the line. That conversation after the break.

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Janae Pierre: Ryan, tell me the truth here. Did you use AI for this story?

Ryan Kailaith: I did. I'll tell you about what I did at the end.

Janae Pierre: We'll save that for later. What can you tell me about Columbia student Roy and his friend? Classmate. Who are they?

Ryan Kailaith: Yes. Roy transferred into Columbia as a sophomore last fall and knew that when he got to school, what he really wanted was to find a co-founder and a wife. He said, "This is the value of an Ivy League." He immediately finds a guy who shares his vision, a junior in the engineering school named Neil Shanmugam, and they decide, "We're going to build a company." In the tech world where these guys work, there's a very normalized thing in the interview process where you do all these coding tests live in front of your interviewer because they want to see how you think. How would you code this little thing? It's almost like an SAT or another standardized test. Roy said he had spent 600 hours training for these in order to be able to do these interviews.

Then he thought, "Oh, what if we build a company that helps you cheat on these tests with AI." He wouldn't really call it cheating. He would just say, making the system more efficient. That's what he did. Roy built this tool that sits undetectable on your computer while you're in a job interview and lets you use AI on the coding problems. His real innovation was, "Okay, I've built this cool tool that a lot of people in the tech world will want to use, but it's not going to work unless we can go viral with it."

Roy: Guys, this is Roy from Interview Coder. Today I'll be showing you how it works on a real Amazon OA.

Ryan Kailaith: He filmed himself using his tool to land internships at all the top companies. He got offers from all of them, posted it, and blew up.

Janae Pierre: That's pretty clever. Tell me, why was Roy suspended?

Ryan Kailaith: Amazon in particular did not love this. They sent a strongly worded letter to Columbia saying, "Hey, your student just did this." You and me, Amazon and Columbia, we have a strong ongoing relationship between our company and your engineering school. Would be ashamed to see something happen to that. Columbia disciplined him. He filmed the disciplinary hearing and posted that, too.

Janae Pierre: Hey, capture lightning in that bottle.

Ryan Kailaith: They suspended him on a technicality. They were like, "You weren't allowed to film and post disciplinary hearings, so now you're suspended."

Janae Pierre: Roy has talked about how normalized the use of AI is already on campus at Columbia. What did he tell you about that?

Ryan Kailaith: In his words, he didn't know a single undergrad at Columbia who does not use AI in an unauthorized way on their assignments.

Roy: It's just, like, so broadly accepted that you'll use AI to write your essays or to do your assignments. Genuinely, I would not be surprised if it was something like 99 to even 100% of undergraduates use AI when they're not allowed to.

Ryan Kailaith: I was a student at Columbia in the grad school last year, and I saw pretty much the same thing. I'd guess probably half the students were using AI on their assignments in a way that they're not supposed to.

Janae Pierre: By the way, we forgot to mention that the name of this app is Cluely, but the tagline is Cheat on Everything. Now, Ryan, that's obviously going to raise some eyebrows, right?

Ryan Kailaith: Yes. This is part of his marketing stunt. He told me that tag line is more marketing than mission.

Roy: [unintelligible 00:04:53] everything is intentionally ambiguous. It's just meant to be provocative. I think if you took a few seconds to think about it, then you would realize that one, the future where we use AI more and more and more is inevitable. Two, as society adopts this future, everyone is going to be uncomfortable with it, but it's better that we just embrace the discomfort and stand in the eye of the hurricane when it happens.

Ryan Kailaith: The product isn't just for these tech interviews anymore. He's envisioned Cluely as an AI layer that sits on your computer for every kind of virtual interaction. He's saying it's not really cheating, it's just research. He used the example of a calculator.

Roy: Back when the calculator came out, people would go on marches to stop people from using the calculator. What do you know, 20 years later, everyone literally has a calculator in their back pocket. AI use is just going to become more widespread.

Janae Pierre: Look at us now.

Ryan Kailaith: Look at us now.

Janae Pierre: Even spellcheck, right?

Ryan Kailaith: Exactly.

Janae Pierre: It's been a minute for me since I've been in college. Didn't do the grad school thing because, know thyself. What about professors, is their stance on AI?

Ryan Kailaith: Most schools that I've looked at they leave it up to the professor on a, case by case, basis. At Columbia, you're allowed to use AI if your professor gives you explicit permission. This is where you get into an interesting thing with you've got a lot of younger, more tech-savvy professors who are saying, "Okay, AI is here to stay. How can I build it into the classroom? How can I build it into assignments? How can I challenge students to show me the value that they, the human being, are adding on top of AI?"

At the same time, you've got some other professors who maybe they're near the end of the career. They've been teaching Shakespeare the same way with the same tried and true assignments for 40 years. That's not going to work anymore because the students can use AI to diagram the Shakespeare sentence or pull out the themes from the reading or write their essays.

I spoke to one professor who falls more on the progressive side of that. Anand Rao he's the chair of the communications department at the University of Mary Washington, also my alma mater, and he was my professor. He had an interesting take on this. He said AI is useful in a very specific way for them.

Anand Rao: We're looking at a disruption that brings back the need for those humanities and liberal arts skills in a way that for the last couple of decades, people have shirked. They've said that those aren't as important anymore technical skills, well, now it's a little different. Those leadership skills, the communication, collaborative, critical thinking skills are incredibly important, especially if you're going to be leading AI agents and tools in the workplace. That has framed my approach.

Ryan Kailaith: He said that honor policies and cheating policies are going to have to evolve and adapt. Because our definition of what cheating is is changing. What does it mean to use a tool appropriately or inappropriately? Is it matter of just letting people know how you're using the tool? Maybe that's enough. How do you negotiate between those things? He's at the forefront of this. He wrote a book on the subject of AI in education. I think we're going to see everybody slowly catch up to the conversation.

Janae Pierre: What kind of message does that send to students building things like this?

Ryan Kailaith: I think you're always gonna see ambitious tech kids who have that. Columbia also attracts a lot of more by the book, traditional, "I'm here to go through school and then get a nice job in my field." The entrepreneurial folks they often have this rebellious streak. I think students who have that are going to admire him. Students who don't are going to think this is a pretty wild gamble.

Janae Pierre: He has already dropped out, right?

Ryan Kailaith: Yes, exactly. He was suspended for a year and took the opportunity to drop out. All the publicity let him raise 5.3 million in a seed round, which is pretty healthy for a company with average age 21 and two people. He moved to San Francisco, got a loft. They're out there coding into the middle of the night, it's just like the social network, basically.

Janae Pierre: I can see Roy Lee right now in his San Francisco loft ordering Chinese takeout, coding until the night, you know. After all of this, though, what's your takeaway from Roy's story?

Ryan Kailaith: I come down, I think, on the side of this is the future that's here, and it's time to adapt to it. It'll be interesting to see how institutions adapt to it slowly, quickly, or not.

Janae Pierre: Yes. On that note, you mentioned at the top that you may have used AI for this story. Tell me more about that.

Ryan Kailaith: I got my editor's permission. I just said, "Why don't I use Roy's tool in the interview to see if I can learn anything or improve anything?" Now, his tool it would have been too much just to download and install or whatever. I did just pull up ChatGPT, and I said, like, "These are the questions I'm thinking about asking him. Do you suggest anything else, or are there things I haven't thought of that would be really interesting to ask?" Unfortunately, it didn't give me anything I could use.

Janae Pierre: All right, well, you still have a job.

Ryan Kailaith: Yes, still adding value.

Janae Pierre: That's WNYC's Ryan Kailaith. Thanks, Ryan.

Ryan Kailaith: Thanks.

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Iru Ekpunobi: Thanks. For listening to NYC Now from WNYC, I'm Iru Ekpunobi. We'll be back tomorrow with some more of our best reporting from 2025.

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