Cheat on Everything: Cluely's Vision for Always-On AI Assistance

Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.

Today, my guest is Roy Li, founder and CEO of Cluey, 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 their provocative invitation to cheat on everything. Now, 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, that I'm actually usually a fan both of edgy marketing and more generally of people who dare to challenge what are arguably outdated social norms.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 Gary Tan after he tweeted that he was muting the term Clue.ly, in which Roy wrote, quote, I have big dreams for this company, Gary. 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 it is 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, all 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 of 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 Cluey 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. Now, 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 Li, founder and CEO of Cluely.

Roy Li, founder and CEO of Cluely, welcome to the Cognitive Revolution.

Thanks for having me, brother.

Uh, I'm excited for this conversation. You have made, uh, quite a bit of noise online in recent, uh, weeks. I think anybody who is paying attention to the AI space has certainly seen your face and your posts and your cinematic, uh, sometimes provocative marketing come across their feed. So 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're 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. So for starters, what does it mean to cheat on everything? What has Cluely helped me? Uh, Chetan, broadly speaking, what is Cluey?

Yeah, I mean, Cluey is the new way that humans will interact with AI. Um, instead of going to chatgpt.com, we envision a future where people use Cluey instead. And how it functions is a desktop app that integrates very deeply with your computer. It has access to your system audio, your microphone, and shows up as a, essentially a pane of glass over all your other applications, and it feeds you relevant information in real time. During a meeting, Cluey 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? Um, cheat on everything means using Cluey to gain advantage in any situation by instantly accessing relevant info. And this is all information that Cluey is feeding me directly. So maximizing productivity and performance with AI everywhere. Um, this is all stuff that, that Cluey literally tells me. Whenever you mention terms, uh, it will float up definitions of the terms all in real time. without you ever knowing that I'm using AI. This is Cluey.

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. I mean, it definitely is. I'm interested to hear a little bit more about sort of the undetectable screen overlay, but it is transcribing just kind of giving you this sort of running diary of what is happening. And then I was just constantly refreshing the what should I say now prompt to have it spit up things for me to say. I thought often enough it was pretty good. I think an obvious challenge, and I'm interested to hear how you think about this as well from a kind of product vision perspective, a lot of the things that you have put forward in terms of use cases are sort of Earlier in relationships, or they're sort of like episodic moments, like you're going to do a coding test for a class or a job or something. These are things where there's not super deep context. I think another interesting question is going to be, how do you kind of build up context where you can actually get to the point where you can help me in a 10-year-plus relationship, right, which I have with my CEO? Because there was just a ton of stuff there that is commonly known and unspoken between the two of us that the thing just has never had any chance to get access to. So yeah, 2 parts there at least, and you can take it as many directions as you want. But how are you making this undetectable screen overlay thing work? I haven't tested that, but does that mean if I take a screenshot, it won't show up? Or help me understand that a little bit better.

Yeah, if you take a Mac native screenshot, it won't show up. If you screen record on your Mac, then it will show up. The Mac screen record functions at a lower level in the OS, but I think undetectability is just a for-fun feature. Essentially, when you're like, 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. And if nothing else, it's an interesting marketing hook. And I guess, yeah, like context depth. So the way we're thinking about this is it is inevitable that a model will come out that has 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 and 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 towards. The way to win that, I believe, I think we're on the right track with the user experience. I think Apple pushes out Liquid Glass, which is essentially the exact same UX that we have, the translucent glass pane overlay on everything. And I think this is, the world is realizing this is how AI will be used in the future. We are the first to market with this UX and it's a land grab to force people into this interaction pattern of instead of going to chatgpt.com, I'll press Command Backslash and I'll use the AI in desktop assistant that I have. And I, once we lock people into that interaction pattern, then we can collect all this data about them. And when the time comes that an open source model comes out that is superintelligence, then we will be the ones to distribute that. And we will have all the data to make this Jarvis.

Interesting. So the idea now is to, and obviously this is a pretty well-established best practice in AI application development, you want to be preparing for future model capabilities and not just trying to supplement the current models and compensate for their weaknesses, but really position 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, then there is like a session that I can go back to later and check out on the web. When I do just like 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 in the web seem to be just like The actual audio and visual recording, right? But the, the ad hoc, just like, hey, here's my screen, do something right now. Is that stuff also all kind of being logged in? Is there even more being logged beyond that that I haven't thought of yet?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right now what we're like, like in meetings, when you use Cluey to record audio, um, you, it is actually like not legal to have just like a running recording of someone and save that recording somewhere, but it is fully possible for you to have an AI note taker that will like transcribe the meeting and summarize it essentially, like turn it into notes. And that, that's what we do. We don't save the actual, like, MP3 audio unless you're an enterprise user who specifically requested that. We don't save that. We only save the AI summary of what happened during the meeting. Similarly, when, whenever you use Chloe to trigger a response, we save the response and, like, the question that you asked it, but all the data is, like, 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. And I do appreciate that, by the way. I've always kind of been a fan of provocative marketing strategies. One of the more interesting things I've heard you say is in the future, it will all be legal. I guess I'd love to hear you unpack, like, what do you think are the current rules, norms, you know, just expectations that people have of one another that will, with time, be looked back on as being sort of, you know, clearly anachronistic or clearly from an earlier time, and we'll all just agree that it was silly to ever have thought that way?

Yeah, I think the entire concept of, like, I guess, data privacy is going to that. I can only imagine in the future that that fear is going to go down. As soon as there is one technology that will massively improve your efficiency in exchange for less data privacy, I think people will just run to that. It has been proven in the past that humans value efficiency of their own work more than pretty much anything else. If giving up your own data will make your model more personalized and more efficient, then people will not hesitate to give it all the data that they can. And I think that will be a relic of the past. I think the whole concept of like copyright laws and like, like protection laws around what data models can and can't use, be used to train on, I think that will all float away into the past. Like right now, America is in an AI arms race against China. And right now China gives their AI model providers full access to all the data that China has. And it is inevitable that America, in order to keep up, will have to ease up on the legal restrictions around that. And if it means that we all in turn get a much better model, then I think everybody will be happy. I think the whole concept of copyright infringement, patents, and protecting your own technology, I think this will all go away. I can only imagine that in the future we will tend towards a world of everything is open source and everything is available for everybody to use. Technology will be fully democratized. It is the only way to make sure that the AI coding agents are improving because they have access to the production-level codebases of the best companies. It is the only way to train models that will significantly beat out China's.

There's a whole other conversation we could have about the competition with China. I might bracket that one for now. Can you maybe give me—

I think this is in such short supply.

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? And 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 be still working? Are we going to be working less? Are we going to be all exploring nature all the time 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 the sort of 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, I mean, it's a hard question. You're essentially going back— like, the analog would be you go back 600 years in time and you ask a blacksmith, hey, here's a steam engine. Can you predict what the world will look like with a steam engine? And he couldn't possibly imagine that there will be data analysts in the future. The only thing he could see, which is quite shortsightedly, would be, wow, this invention is going to completely automate away my jobs. 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, like, you know, like the manual labor that comes with blacksmithing. This is an art. And like, like he will think only negative things about it. It will not be possible to understand the positive implications of technology. And I think this is something that I think most people are shortsighted in. In reality, if we do have a superintelligence and an AI that can just cognitively do everything that a human can do, but better, this will inevitably result in faster scientific progress, like, like 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. And the whole concept of capital creation and the idea of working to add value to— add capitalistic value to society, I think that will be probably 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. If you want a hamburger, you can snap your fingers and 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 like, you don't go out and work a data analyst job 8 hours a day doing some mindless work that you hate. Instead, you go out and you go out walk, 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 and you talk about interesting things and you philosophize about life and you go out and explore nature and you do all the things that you were naturally compelled to. I think it is proven that even when AI automates away difficult things, humans will still err towards doing difficult things. We see that with chess. When the first chessbot came out that 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— our default states of desire do not devolve to just output for the sake of output. I think humans naturally do things because we naturally want to do things. Everyone has things that they naturally want to do. And when the science comes for us to truly realize, abstract away all the shit that is unnecessary and only do the things that we truly enjoy doing, then this will be a complete 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 now no longer find beauty in woodworking for the sake of like, like having like a final sculpture at the end. You will just find beauty in the process of doing it and you will do it because you intrinsically want to do it. And I think like another thing that I'm quite optimistic about with like scientific progress is the ability to sort of control and turn on and off what we find joy doing. Right now, like probably one of the big societal dangers is that everyone doom scrolls 4 hours a day and you're just like scrolling on this minus 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 just literally flip a switch and you could no longer find dopamine from scrolling and you would instead force yourself to find dopamine from, I don't know, reading English texts 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 is not hedonism or mindless going to the spa. want to do things that make them like, like read literature, paint art, like go out, go for runs, live healthier lives, garden. Like, like 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, um, they are bearish on this for, I, I, I, I think the wrong reason. If you can choose exactly the life that you want to have, and live that, then every single person in the world would be living exactly the life that they want. And I think this will be 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 just a tool. Maybe 10 to 20% of white-collar jobs get automated away, but essentially everyone just lives the same life and they're just 20% improved.

Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. It sounds like you are a quite AGI-pilled superintelligence believer though.

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

What role do you, I mean, I find entrepreneurship in this context interesting, almost to the point of like paradoxical. I've spent most of my career as an entrepreneur and that's kind of always been my instinct. And yet I find in this AI era, I'm a little less inclined toward it, partly because I'm like, where are the moats and all that kind of basic analysis? But also partly because I'm like, well, is it all going to just kind of come out in the wash? Or is there the sort of idea of like, oh, I could build a generational company and have this long-term impact, maybe even something that outlives me? It feels like that's very hard to do in a future scenario where superintelligence for all comes on the scene and everybody is sort of living their best, most philosophical life.

Right.

What is the contribution that you want to make and on what timescale? And in a sense, who's it for? Is it for you? Is it for the public? Is it like, in a world where everybody is sort of 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— the future is an eventuality only because there are human beings who work tirelessly to make that future an eventuality. But there are enough humans out there that it will inevitably come. And I think I find it very exciting that I am helping society progress towards that future. If my only contribution is sort of like planting and 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. And right now, I think I'm living like the most fulfilled life I could ever be living. In a different world, I would be interning at Meta as like some brain-dead software engineer, fearing for my job and career and future prospects and getting ready for summer classes in my junior year at Columbia next year. And that is just 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 it with less than a grain of salt. Nobody knows what the future looks like in 5, 10, 20 years. And the only thing you can do is make movement in the direction that you believe is positive. And I truly believe I'm moving like the most positive direction for human society. In my perspective, I am working towards a future where cancer is cured, Alzheimer's is cured, and we all live forever in the most optimal idealistic life that we ever want. And that is the future that I'm chasing. And I think that's a very positive future for me.

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

The more that people use AI, the more productive they will be. And if this tool, if all it does is make everyone 10% more productive, Then I will have single-handedly resulted in essentially like 700 million human beings worth of productivity into the world, which would be really, really great. And if alternatively, but I actually think that this technology is way bigger than that. And if it is more than that, and if it like actually like rapidly enhances AI adoption worldwide, then I think it will do more, much, much more than that. Like the world, there will be more money that is funneled into AI research and development. There will be more of a common, okay, we're all using AI. Like, this isn't so bad. Like, like, this is great.

Mm-hmm.

It will increase optimism for AI. It will 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— I don't know if this is a strategy from the beginning or if it's something you stumbled into and then have found has worked and doubled down on. But even in just your last couple of responses, you took a couple shots at the sort of, 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 like a pretty high prestige job at big tech?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, A, 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 like the immortal legacy of an Ivy League or like a big tech institution. But also I think people naturally, like, they don't want to be a cog in the wheel. Nobody wants to grow up and live a life that is of meaningless, you know, like capital production, and that's all they do and that's all they will ever do. And everyone wants to make an impact and a dent in the universe. And I think like, everyone is attracted to the idea of starting their own thing because, you know, like, it'd be great if I could make an impact on the universe and it'd be great if I wasn't a cog in the wheel. And I think like me right now, I am probably a living example of what happened, like what that could look like. And I think people are, people of my age are inspired and excited by the life that I am living and like the alternative career path that I'm suggesting. And I don't think there's like, there's been very few people in this world who have been happy. And completely content with just like being some industrial cog. And I also think that the glamour of school and jobs is like it's getting lost in the newer generations. I mean, we were all told growing up all you got 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 like not what we're seeing. Like college graduates, what is it, like 30% unemployment rate? It's like ridiculous. You graduate college, you do everything that you're told, And it is just not true. There's this seed of doubt in everyone's mind, like, hey, maybe everything the older generation told us was wrong. They've put me in this terrible position where I ended up spending years and years of my life doing something that I hated doing, which is rote memorization and studying for bullshit useless concepts, all in exchange for some semblance of stability. And now there's AI here and unemployment rates are skyrocketing. What can I do? I think there's a lot of frustration in my generation and an interest in choosing Like something that there must be something better that it could have done. And I think like, I am like a metaphorical and physical manifestation of like the path not trodden.

It's interesting how broad that critique is. And I'm certainly pretty sympathetic to a lot of it. You know, the gerontocracy is not serving us super well in many different ways, I would say. But it wasn't, 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, is Columbia specifically starting to find its footing at all, or are they still taking a bury the head in the sand Approach?

They're, they're, they're sort of letting like the professors manage the classes as they please, and everyone has their own rules around AI. But generally, I can, I can tell you with 100% confidence that at least 95 to 99, if not fully just 100% of all Columbia students have used AI to cheat on an exam before or assignment before. And it's just not— it is— you, you would literally be weird if you said, I've never used AI to cheat on an assignment before, like, like for homework or something. You would literally be seen as the odd one out. And I think schools and just older generations have not caught on to how massive the AI hive mind has been for college students and people of my generation. The people that will grow into high-profile drops in the future, every single one of them has cheated using AI and realized the potential of AI to massively improve their output in school. And yeah, I think people are not ready for what happens when these kids get 5 years older. And they are true. These are, this is truly an AI-native generation.

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

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 show up to take an exam, We didn't really have means of cheating. I think cheating was pretty rare. Do you think that 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, I mean, it depends. I think there's 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 on the actual, you go in a classroom, you sit down, take an exam, A, I think this actual format is outdated and probably in 5 years we won't see this again ever anywhere in America. But also B, I think 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 is 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 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. They'll essentially ask you the programming equivalent of how many hairpins will fit in the Empire State Building. And it's, it's, 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 much, how many hours have you spent memorizing these riddles? So it was pretty stupid. It's pretty obsolete. And it's quite simple to just take a picture of the riddle, ask ChatGPT what's the answer to the riddle, and just get the answers. That's exactly what I built, a tool called InterviewCoder, which is an invisible, um, the UX looks extremely similar to Cluey. It's a pane of glass that appears over your screen. It's invisible to screen share so that an interviewer doesn't know that you're using AI. It'll take a picture of the screen. It will give you the answer of what exactly is the answer to the programming riddle. I record myself publicly using this tool to get an offer at Amazon. I use it through the entire interview process, and I completely fool the interviewer into not thinking that I'm using AI. I post it on YouTube. It goes very, very viral. An Amazon interviewer sees it. 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 like a very thinly veiled threat. And Columbia hears this, drags me into a loop of unnecessary disciplinary hearings that ultimately end in my suspension from the school.

Interesting. The, um, I'll have to request comment from Amazon on the, uh, on the threat concept, but we do know that Columbia administration is at least somewhat willing to, to, uh, bow to threats. I've seen that on multiple dimensions. So at that point, was it basically over for you? Was there any sort of, were you offered a chance to like recant or apologize, or was it kind of like, 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 the moment. I thought what I was doing was like an obvious— like, not only was it essentially the equivalent of how a computer science major conducts a protest, but it also was, I think, like generally a way that the future will tend. Like, it was ridiculous that I'm not allowed to use AI on the programming assignment when in the job I'll be using AI to write 90% of the code anyways, if that's the number that Google's reporting. It's just absurd to me. And I thought if I bowed my head right now, I am probably one of the few people in the world right now who are capable of charging this perhaps revolution. That might be a bit high-horsy 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. And I think if I apologize right then and there, then it would just dilute the story and I would not internally feel proud of myself for doing that.

Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. How would you describe your own personal code of ethics as it relates to AI? I have some sub-questions there, but maybe start off with the broad one.

I live principally by a theory of AI maximalism. I think every single chance I am able to use AI where it helps me, I should use AI to be helpful. I think if you think that If an AI can do a task today, then you would have to be really stupid not to think that it could do the 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 that 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 other people, 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 accomplish the object-level task in front of me, and the other is figure out how much and how AI can actually help me accomplish that task. So I definitely share that. I guess, is there a limit to it, though? In thinking about this, I recalled the Overemployed subreddit, which is— and this exists, by the way, earlier than AI, which is maybe its own indictment of certain big tech companies where people report doing this, but the thread is full of people telling stories of how they got multiple remote jobs at tech companies and sort of tried to like do the minimum to not get fired at both of them and just like collect multiple comp packages. And of course, they're generally doing this without telling the companies that they're doing it. Does that feel okay? Like if you're, if you're smart enough to hold down multiple big tech jobs with your AI assistant, More productivity, or—

Like 100%, like the companies, they themselves don't care. Like they're hiring you to fulfill, 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 like also the framework that we adopt here. We don't set any strict hours on anything, but people, like we do set strict output requirements and the output requirements are quite strict. And I think everybody works hard to fulfill the output. But if everybody 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. I think overemployment is like 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 bitch about hours.

Okay. I know that right now, Clue.ly 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 max outputs, including potentially holding down n remote jobs with as little input as possible, thanks to AI. You could imagine just kind of taking the human out of the loop entirely, or just like, I maybe have 8 Clueleys running on 8 laptops, one for each of my 8 jobs. And at some point, the AI is just kind of doing the job. And if it's today's AIs, it's probably doing kind of 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 start to 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 just short and sweet, but I think powerful AI regulation. You all know Harari has advanced this idea that AI must always identify itself as AI. So 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 kind of pushing the product frontier to the point where this question of will the AI identify itself as AI, Actually becomes a real live issue for you in terms of how much people can push the cheating frontier.

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 of thinking about it is just AI is a tool that will help you make more output in whatever capacity that means. And I think if you think about it that way, I don't say this hat was made by a Chinese worker and it was made by a stitching machine and that was made by silicon and that was made by— you can get infinitely regressive with the blame. And I think the only thing that should matter, that ought to matter, is output for everybody involved. It should be output. If you go on a great date, even the most extreme example, you go on a great date, you have a great time, that is the output. If the output of that is satisfactory, then what happens? So what if you went on an AI date? Even in cases like that, you shouldn't have an AI be forced to announce themselves 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. It's really hard for me to think of jobs that an AI could be able to automate that a human would be more internally, intrinsically fulfilled in doing. For example, customer support calls. That is like a shockingly big use case of 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 their job where they are just like a customer service rep? 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. And I think, of course, an AI should be able to do that. And 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 10x's. And when output 10x's, I just think it will be a better future for everybody.

Yeah, that's fascinating. So, I mean, putting your own dating hat on, I don't know 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 whatever to say at every given point, you feel like that's fine, no big deal. In the future, everybody will— 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 like, people do sort of— maybe let's just say this isn't going to be— one day we'll look back on it and feel like it was a product of an earlier time. But people do, I think, care about where it comes from. It's like the idea that it's the thought that counts, right? I mean, that's an old adage that people are kind of like, yeah, well, 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. I don't really— And Google had this kind of stepping it moment, right? I'm sure you recall this, where they, during the Olympics, had this ad that showed— the story was that a little girl wants to write to her hero who's an Olympian, and the dad's like, this letter's got to be perfect. And 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 and them expressing themselves and figuring out who they are and what they care about. And so I do feel like there's— I don't know, I don't think it's just the old man romantic in me saying that. 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 there is this intrinsic preference that still feels right.

I think at one point things filter down, and I actually agree with you on this. 100%, there's some conversations and some things that you value only for the, like, like the sentimental value or like the knowledge that some human put effort into it. And I think those things can coexist in a world where AI sort of automates away all tasks. Like, I think the dad with the image example is like a perfect example, actually. An AI can generate an image that is great. And if you ever needed an image, if you ever cared about the output of having like a proper image, then like you can already do that with an AI. 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, is the moments, the things of effort that we intrinsically value. And this is sort of like the world that I was picturing when all output is immediate and complete, like the path to getting anything is obfuscated, then We will still find value in the meaningful things that we ourselves put in effort into, and a child will still want to draw despite just being able to have an AI automatically spawn in a beautiful painting. It doesn't matter because— and I would argue that's probably a case where the output is something different than just a tangible good drawing. I would argue that the actual output that you're wanting there is human input, and that is something that AI will never be able to completely offskid away.

Yeah.

If that makes sense.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, 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— you called it sentimental, you might call it connection, sort of overarching narrative of who we are and how we exist together and all that sort of stuff.

Exactly.

It sounds like you would sort of acknowledge, like, if my kid used an AI and tried to pass it off as their own work and giving me a Father's Day gift, that would be sort of 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, or it wasn't just about the output in the first place. And so in that cheating, there's still something that I I guess, should I be upset 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? And it's obviously not the talent demonstrated in the painting. It's like the level of input that you put in. And I think like then that's just a bad judgment. Like, like it's poor output is what it is. But I, I think generally, yeah, like, like 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 like a positive for humanity. Really, I guarantee you wouldn't care if your shipping was all done by robots. Like you order a t-shirt and instead of being made by like Chinese child workers, it was instead made by a robot. Like you'd probably be pretty happy with that, in fact. And then there's just like an AI automating itself and there's no need for it to, in every step of the process, say that, oh, when AI or robot did this. This is not done by a human. It doesn't matter. But certainly there's 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 ASI. And this will actually be 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.

I'm with you, by the way, on most of this, if not all of it. I think the So often people who are in the AI discourse are 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 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. And I do sometimes ask people that question. And depending on who I ask, sometimes people just look at me like I'm crazy. And they're like, you're telling me the deal, just to make sure, right? Like, the deal you're offering me is I get the money, I don't have to do the job. They're like, yeah, I'll take it. It's like, you sound crazy kind of 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 kind of how adaptable people will be when it comes to finding new things to fulfil themselves and new sources of meaning, so on and so forth. In the utopian scenario, I think all that stuff is probably— 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, they're kind of like, look, we get it, right? The coding test that we give you, it's like, 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 that we kind of—

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 kind of need something there to try to measure, gauge, assess on. 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 a couple of different angles on that question. The first one is just like, in what areas does the AI cheating actually get you into a place where you can then be successful? And in what maybe other domains, if you cheated through the initial hurdles, would you find yourself in way over your head and end up failing because the AI can't actually help you with the real thing?

Yeah, I think this is like, sort of goes back to the whole idea of output is the only thing that matters. I think 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. And my second point is a little bit more complicated, but generally, yeah, I think the whole concept of a programming middle 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 tasks that I've ever done in my life, and then it should be able to tell you with exact certainty, like, hey, this guy is like a proficient TypeScript developer and he's like lacking in this and this. He's like overall like a 76 out of 100% candidate. And like that should be how assignments are done in the future. Like 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. And 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'm 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 models stand 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 fill Google that the AI can't do. Perhaps that will go as far back as learning addition and basic multiplication so that I can get to matrix multiplication so that I can get 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 jumps, that can fill in many of the gaps for me. Oftentimes the way to cheat— even if you adopt a cheat on everything philosophy, there will still be things that you have to learn. I guess that is why cheat on everything is a valid moral framework. If you try and do things the fastest way that you possibly can do everything, there will still be some things that the AI cannot do. For you to make that last jump off it, it might require like 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 a jump that technology cannot get you to, in which 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.

If any—

still cheat on everything and learning foundational skills, Both of those coexist in the world that I propose.

Yeah, a 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 sort of just a generally important foundational step. I mean, and 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? Like, in the physical realm, we have cars and we have boats, but it's still pretty helpful to run and swim to just build up the physical capacity to do that. It's like 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 it could even be into adults. I'm not necessarily limiting 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, we're all going to build a sandcastle, they see the vision of the sandcastle in their head and they enjoy working towards the vision. They will learn a a bunch of random skills as they're building towards the same castle. And this is objectively a good thing. And I think if— I can only imagine if I was 7 years old and my goal was, man, I really want to learn— I just read Harry Potter. This was amazing. It was a great book. I want to learn how to write like that. If you gave me nothing but pen and paper, then I'd probably have a really hard time. And it probably gets maybe 2 pages of 7-year-old generated bullshit before I get to realizing, 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, you know, I can generate like a million different story ideas. I can have AI draft a million different things and all of a sudden I can explore different pipelines and maybe I will actually come to something very interesting. And as I'm writing, I'll realize, hey, this isn't exactly as good as J.K. Rowling's, or hey, the plot, like I feel like the Harry Potter story was like a lot cooler in this way. Like I can go in this direction. And I think I guarantee you I will have learned more from doing that exploration than I would have if you just gave me pen and pencil by a fucking firelight. And told me like, write a story that is comparable to Harry Potter. And I will have learned different skills, sure. Like maybe I don't know exactly, like maybe my grammatical knowledge is a little less. I don't exactly know when to put a semicolon, but I do know how to like, I will have the ability, like the goal of mine would be to recreate Harry Potter. And this is like, I'm speaking from like a life experience, something that I tried to do in 7th grade or like when I was 7. And just if I had AI, I can only imagine I would have learned so much more. 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 pen and pencil, try and 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 largely with you. We just did an episode not long ago with Mackenzie Price, who's the founder of Alpha School. They're doing all AI instruction in 2 hours a day, and then the afternoon is just like all about these exploratory projects. Kids go in 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 kind of 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 just in online discourse, right? There's always the question, am I arguing with an AI right now? And that's also one of the reasons I kind of think an AI must identify itself rule is potentially good, because here I am thinking I'm engaging in discourse, and trying to move my fellow voters and trying to help steer society in a positive direction. And that's the way I'm thinking about the output. But the Russian troll farm on the other end of the equation, they're 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 kind of 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, I feel like I can sort of today 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— if you were to take the Kantian, universalise the maxim, 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, coal mining space, and I know nothing about the coal mining space, and we're trying to have an eager conversation about the coal mining space. And as we're talking, I have Cluey pull up definitions that I know exactly what he's talking about when he's talking about the Amherst mining incident of 1982. And I know, and I have extra context about the conversation. Now we can have like a deeper conversation about like whatever it is he's actually trying to get at. Is that actually like losing trust in conversation? Is that like a loss of trust? I would argue probably not. It's just something that helps the conversation get to a point where, you know, like beyond the random need for memorization facts and all this stuff. And I think people are worried about a time where AI is like more human than humans. And I think this is just like the incorrect worry. Like, like they worry about a time when AI is able to romance their girlfriend or, or like, like enjoy, enjoy itself better than humans. And then like, like, like tell you, you will have more fun if you go to the pool right now than if you go to the beach. But I think actually an AI will never be able to do this because these are all like, you know, like our own preferences and opinions. And like, like, like these are things that the ultimate meaning of what it is to be human is to decide the things that you want to do. And 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. 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 it is not the case that trust is being eroded, but rather we're getting to the actual core philosophical meaning of the conversation. What is it you're actually trying to talk about? You have an enriched conversation thanks to AI. And the conversations will, as AI usage grows and grows, boil down to the deepest, most human, I guess, like, essence of the conversation. Like, what is it you are actually trying to say? Why are you here in a conversation with me? Because at some point, 2 humans made the conscious decision to engage in a conversation with each other and to talk about something. And perhaps the discourse is like, maybe discourse on like, hey, what year did World War II start? And AI tells you the answer. Like, maybe that sort of discourse goes away, but I don't think that's actually discourse at all. AI serves best in giving you information and helping you Helping you decide the core tastes and thoughts and opinions that you have. But at the very core, the impetus of everything is your human decision and your human impulse. And I think society will just trend towards expecting that people are using AI, but AI will never ever replace the, you think this girl is pretty, go talk to her. Like, I make that decision.

Unclear to me to what degree you cheated with the initial example there of the real-time English to Spanish translation, but 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. And I do think that is one of the most just purely aspirational AI product implementations that I've ever seen, because it's just been a human impulse or desire, dream for so long to overcome language barriers.

Exactly.

And they have something here that is actually making it real. And so as you were talking there, I was kind of reflecting on, okay, how should I feel under different situations where 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 Clue.ly just popped it up? Right now. And I think in this example, I don't know that I really care that much. I mean, 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. Yeah, I don't know. I think that probably comes down to the— It's output-oriented. It's a good point.

Yeah, I guess right, right, right now, the way, the reason you prefer the serendipitous way is because as you understand it, the way, the, the, the way that would gather that information is by like, like going through and doing research on you manually via, via, via Twitter. And it is not yet universal and commonplace that I could use an AI to just pull that information up. But that, that, that's because like, like your understanding of how like knowing X knowledge means Y effort, like, like that, as soon as that logical train of thought is broken, then in the future, like you probably wouldn't think that. For example, it probably meant a lot to someone to get a beautifully typed up, almost like calligraphy that looks typed up letter from someone because they know that if letters are beautiful, that means that someone put a lot of effort into making 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 Kooi does, Then you will start to dissociate these things and you'll start to make different connections. Perhaps it is not a knowledge of your Twitter algorithm that suggests effort being put into researching about you. It is perhaps a deeper knowledge about something personal that you might have only told me in person. And that would be suggestive of effort. But I think when you break that one link, it doesn't actually undermine the entire I appreciate it when people put effort into me. It just disconnects that one specific link.

Going back for a second to the question of assessments, I thought you had a pretty interesting idea there around just like, if my concern as a hiring company is I need something that I can do in manageable 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 know 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. Just so many different contexts. And even just like my— I think one concern we might have about AI and society in general is it may sort of track us prematurely, or sort of 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 uplevelling and switching from track A to track B because their sort of long-term narrative, as understood by AI, is on this particular course. And 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 kind of reposition myself as a new kind of professional. And 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, I think 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 Or at least be able to determine what regulations would be most optimal for society in terms of what information that we are able to know about each other. But 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 right now the current system is very flawed where you try to shove every single bit of your professional experience on a one-page resume and that gets sent to a human whose subjective eye and their laziness, their mood during that time of day, there's a million external factors. And like, like you could have lied about your resume. Like there's so many, so many things that, that, um, make the current hiring process extremely inefficient. And I think that right now, currently, a better thing exists where probably you could just— and, and I, and I'm pretty sure this is like sort of, sort of what Mercure does, but there's like a different type of resume where an AI, you can just sort of speak to an AI about the things that you're good at. And AI judges your, your, your, the relevant skills that an employer puts in. For example, the employer says, I really care about the guy's cadence and his ability to speak and his ability to persuade me. And 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 at going deep and trying to figure out and verify that you've done the things that you say you've done. But I think almost anything is better than what we have right now, partially because it's gameable and partially because it's too gameable, and partially because an AI can sort of do it better.

Let's change gears to your marketing. You are producing a lot of viral content.

Yes.

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 like an entire in-house film studio. We have like videographers, we have a really nice camera, we have lighting, we have editors, we have everything that is needed to almost produce a movie in-house. And I think like we don't use AI because AI is not yet capable of, well, We don't use AI for a lot because AI is not yet capable of doing the level of videography and editing that we ourselves are personally capable of doing. And again, the only thing that matters is output here. What we can use AI for and what we often use AI for is to storyboard exactly what every video looks like and help us draft scripts that will be funny and comedic. But yeah, how we actually come across these ideas, I think this is just a— we're a bunch of 20, 21-year-olds who've spent 4 hours a day scrolling on IG, TikTok. We are sufficiently brainrotted 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 like so nerdy. They don't scroll. They pride themselves on not scrolling. They pride themselves on literally being like intellectual and not funny. As a result, like when I, when I come out and I'm— I've been fucking like spent the last 20 years of my life on Instagram, like 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 now I've just been blessed with, with, with the money to make it controversial and cinematic. And, um, I think the second benefit of something being cinematic is, uh, people pause and will watch it way more if there's like, 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, um, I, like, I, I am more of a bro than I am a tech bro.

What's the difference?

I mean, the difference, um, I think tech bro is a specific type of nerdy, sit in front of a computer, code all day and talk AI SaaS and all this shit. But in reality, I feel like I am much more of a bro. I'm more human and more tech agnostic.

But I have no idea.

It's just like random personality descriptions. But the world will probably see me as a tech bro, but I think no tech bro would see me as a tech bro.

I might have a, uh, proposal for you from my company, Waymark, which we've just launched Waymark Cinematic. So our, our core product is an AI video creator for small business, and it wouldn't hit on the level that you guys are shipping on, but it does actually work really well for like local and small businesses in their local communities. But with all the new stuff that has come out, we recently just launched kind of 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. And it actually, I'm not, it's funny. I, part of the reason I started this company and created an AI video maker for small businesses, because I myself am not good at this sort of thing. So I very much had to partner with people who really know it. But 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 like, all I'm seeing is like clearly, you know, UGC campaigns.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So. Is this another area? I assume you're like 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 like there's 2 big types of consumer marketing that is done on IG, TikTok. One is influencer marketing and the other is UGC. And UGC is, well, among many, those are sort of the 2 most popular ones. UGC, you just have like some random 20-year-old. Literally, these videos are not even 10 seconds long. These accounts are completely fresh. And the only thing that you want to get at is this feels like a real person talking, and they'll come up with some viral hook, and they'll just talk about your product. And it's like really simple, maybe 2 sentences of dialogue, the whole thing. And it will be ridiculously simple, and it'll be 10 seconds. But these are the videos that generate 5 million views and are like the most converting videos that we have on the platform. For you, this, like, we know exactly which UGC hooks will grab the attention of 20-year-olds in college. And, um, we, we have this like down to a science. Um, and we, we, we, we, we know exactly what sticks, what works best, what converts best, and all the other metrics. But the reason you don't see it on your timeline is because the hooks are not catered to you. Like, you are not the ICP of the hooks. The ICP of the hooks is like 20, 20, like 16 to 20-year-olds that are in school. And as a result, for some people, it will literally be like they cannot get this off their timelines because we have nailed the ICP so much. And for some people like you, it'll just be, I've never seen this 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 got a little work to do to steer the algorithm to get me into the Clue.ly demographic.

Anything?

I mean, we talked about the pane of glass. You shared kind of a vision for this sort of how you are kind of on the same page in a sense as Apple with this sort of overlay AI experience. My general sense of your trajectory, if I understand it correctly, it's like 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. This stuff won't resonate in the future. So is the idea that you are going to blitzscale as much and as fast as possible on the sort of asymmetric advantage that you have now to kind of push past what the sort of polite companies like Anthropic and Google and OpenAI can do to achieve market share and then kind of mature alongside them and they will also kind of bend your way as norms kind of resettle and then you'll be competing with them on like a less asymmetric basis long-term?

I, uh, I mean, you see that long-term future unfolding for you? Yeah, I, the, the, this is actually the future that I'm less certain about because everything depends on how much of corporate culture are we able to change with our marketing right now. I think already you are seeing tremors of the launch video affect startup culture. All of a sudden launches are becoming way more cinematic. People are trying to crack the controversial thing way more. And if this actually becomes more than just a wave in the water and just becomes like 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, like, fuck it, I'm going to do whatever I want attitude on with us well into the company's maturity. But if it is the case that this is sort of just a bump that lets us hit escape velocity, but still like standard among all companies is that you'd be professional and you'd be corporate and you'd be buttoned up. And perhaps there's a future where we button up and all of this is rested on— all of this is downstream of the case that our marketing takes us to escape velocity. And the only question is, will our marketing take us to escape velocity, change the game of marketing forever for everyone? If it doesn't— if it does, then we'll keep it going. And if it doesn't, then we will button up. And I guess to answer the point of like cheat on everything, will that specific like we are the rebel, you know, like punching up, will that fade as we become like the dominant player in the market? I actually don't think that it is us being the little guys punching up right now that people are being so captivated by. I just think generally the marketing, whether it was me that did all this marketing, whether it was Sam A or Elon that did all this marketing, it would be just as controversial and Engageable. And I don't actually think that the core reason people are engaging with us is because we are 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 like resonating with people is because it's more than anything, like, also like super transparent. I think everything I do, like, I seem controversial, but in reality, this is just me being honest. And even cases where I'm not being super controversial, like sometimes I'll be on Twitter and I'll make like a heartfelt, like, I respect you a lot. Like, that is also just me being honest. And I think like all the controversial shit 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 like we aim to be like 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 Comp packages up to $1 million plus equity. Tell me what you're looking for, you know, for $1 million plus equity, and maybe just a little bit about your kind of experience trying to hire at the very high end of the AI talent pool right now.

Yeah, I mean, I guess like, I feel like people are so wrong about this right now. Revenue timelines are 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. And everyone agrees, seems to agree, that the best way to swing big is by having the best talent. And 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. Like, bro, nobody knows about your company. You guys 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 guys that are going to win and just give them 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 is going to grow massively. And I think like this all happens downstream of us sort of like being willing to pay at the top end of the compensation packages and convincing them of the culture. Nobody knows your company culture if they have not been there for like a month. And if they have been there for a month, then they should be employed. So I guess like my experience paying, I think paying at the top end of the comp packages allows for a really, really strong top of funnel. And even if like, like the most money hungry guy that will come in saying like, I'm only here for the cash, they'll come in and I promise you they'll be captivated by the culture and 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, talk about girls together, we talk about dudes together. And it's like, this is like a fun, exciting, fulfilling life. And even if you might've come in for the million dollar a year comp package, like you will stay because you cannot do anything other than Cluey. It is the most fun you will ever have in your adult life. And generally, I think it is— surprisingly, there seems to be a lot of noise in programmers. We're looking for really, really competent full-stack engineers. And there's a lot of people who are really good at research, really good at low-latency optimizations, but it's not the thing that we're looking for. That's something that has surprised me since trying to hire is that there's a lot of people with really great backgrounds, but it's just the background in the wrong thing. And as it turns out, we are actually looking for a very specific type of engineer who's capable of very Yeah, I think, I think, I think that, that, that, that answers your, your questions.

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

This is the most interesting time in human history. I think you should take more risks. And, um, right now the riskiest move is probably what you determined to be the safest move.

Yeah. Food for thought. Roy Li, founder and CEO of Cluely. Thank you for being part of the Cognitive Revolution.

Awesome, man. Thanks for having me.

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