Months after debuting Cluely, the “undetectable AI that thinks for you,” 21-year-old tech entrepreneur Chungin “Roy” Lee is decrying the dismal state of education due to AI.
Indeed, there’s little doubt that AI has completely flipped education on its head. The availability of large language models (LLMs) at the press of a finger is all but obliterating the minds of an entire generation of students, making literacy a thing of the past as big tech money floods into schools and teachers unions.
It’s a fascinating charge coming from Lee, though, whose now $7 million cheating program got himself and his cofounder Neel Shanmugam expelled from Columbia University.
“No one understands what’s happening on college campuses [right now],” the tech wunderkind pined on X-formerly-Twitter. “Top 0.001% are really good, the rest graduate hyper-incompetent. Traditional education is the first industry that AI has genuinely disrupted. The solution is something radically different, [I don’t really know] what tho.”
When one poster challenged Lee on whether he himself had contributed to the destruction of education in the US, the CEO had little to offer by way of alternatives, or really any vision for the future. Instead, he simply reasoned that there’s a “system that is much better than traditional education that will much better serve the people of today.”
In other words, Lee’s perfectly content on destroying traditional education — a system which can trace its evolution back to the philosophers of ancient Greece — to make a buck. Just don’t bother asking him what should take its place.
“Thinking is the slowest thing you do,” as Cluely’s website chimes. “Let AI do it for you instead.”
Granted, Lee doesn’t necessarily see the downfall of public education, which he calls an “industry,” as a negative.
“Shorter attention spans, increasing willingness to use ‘unethical’ shortcuts to work they deem useless, never before seen levels of cultural fluency are not necessarily bad things,” he continued. “They are only necessarily bad in the context of school as we understand it today.”
In response to more criticism, Lee declared that he’s simply “accelerating the collapse of a doomed industry.”
While the Cluely founder’s non sequiturs have all the sting of a middle school libertarian’s 4chan posts, they’re an instructive look into the minds of Silicon Valley’s “disruptors,” the chosen few tech elites who now steer our economy.
A similarly reckless ethos can be found in figures like Mark Zuckerberg, whose globe-spanning platform Meta became the flash point of a genocide in Myanmar, or Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist whose self-stated goal is to use AI to “break the economy.”
Lee’s right: the future of education is up in the air. But the real question is what he and his tech bros plan to do about it, and just how much AI they’ll jam in before the dust settles.
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