Over the past few months, a 21-year-old undergraduate went from viral sensation to startup founder after getting suspended by Columbia for creating an AI that helps you cheat.

In a LinkedIn post announcing a successful seed fundraising round, founder Chungin "Roy" Lee explained that his software, which was formerly called Interview Coder and is now called Cluely, is a "completely undetectable AI that sees your screen, hears your audio, and gives you real-time assistance in any situation."

To Lee's mind, that use case doesn't constitute "cheating." Columbia, clearly, disagreed when it sought disciplinary action against him and his cofounder Neel Shanmugam when since-deleted recorded demos of the tool, which initially just helped people "cheat" on job interviews that use the notoriously difficult LeetCode testing platform — went viral.

As Lee explained in an interview with the New York Times' "Hard Fork" podcast, he was more surprised to find himself "flooded with disciplinary messages from Columbia" than when he was offered internships at Amazon and other companies after using the AI to ace his interviews.

"I read the student handbook quite thoroughly before I actually started building this thing, because I was ready to burn bridges with Amazon, but I didn’t actually expect to get expelled at all," the youthful tech founder told podcast host Kevin Roose. "And the student handbook very explicitly doesn’t mention anything about academic resources."

When the NYT reached out to Columbia to ask why Shanmugam and Lee were disciplined for building an AI that was, ostensibly, not being used to cheat on schoolwork, the school denied comment, citing federal privacy regulations.

Both cofounders, meanwhile, decided to drop out and pursue "cheating" full-time. They made customized "F*ck Leetcode" condoms, rebranded as Cluely, filmed a "Black Mirror"-esque demo video, and raised $5.3 million in seed funding — all in the last month.

For all the hype surrounding Cluely and its Ivy League bad boy cofounders, its main conceit — that it's "undetectable" — may not be relevant for much longer. In a recent post on the r/webdev subreddit, a user claims to have created, with "just a few lines of Swift code," a detection tool that can unmask Cluely and identify the interviewer.

Whether that tool works remains to be seen — but hopefully, building the buzzy new AI will have been worth giving up an Ivy League education.

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