Meet 21-year-old with Tamil roots controversially reshaping AI future

CHENNAI: They built an AI tool to “cheat” and used that to land internships in marquee firms, which got one of them kicked out of an elite university in the US while the other dropped out. Now, the startup that the boy with Tamil roots and his Korean-origin friend launched has bagged a multimillion-dollar investment; and they are charting the path to quickly – and controversially – reshape what AI tools can do, including how they can be used to “cheat on everything” as the startup’s tagline says.

Meet Neel Shanmugam, the 21-year-old whose parents hail from Periyakulam and Kovilpatti, who is the chief operating officer of Cluely, the startup that he founded with Chungin ‘Roy’ Lee who is the chief executive officer.

They met at Columbia University, New York, in the beginning of the fall semester (September 2024), and worked on a few side projects together. They realised that they enjoyed working with each other and decided they would work on a startup together.

The idea behind their first full-fledged tool was simple. In a social media post, Neel said, “You're not gonna get rewarded for memorisation and doing things ChatGPT can do; you are gonna get rewarded for using ChatGPT to learn faster, build cooler shit, and solve harder problems (sic).”

That thought resulted in the creation of InterviewCoder that provides real-time assistance with coding questions during technical interviews. An undetectable overlay that sits atop desktop applications, it remains invisible to the other party during screen-sharing. “You hit a button to take a screenshot of a coding problem, and then our tool responds with the solution, an explanation, and other helpful information,” Neel said in a conversation with DT Next.

Roy used it to ‘cheat’ on LeetCode, a platform for coding questions that many leading firms use, and landed prized internships at Amazon, TikTok, and Meta, etc. “To be clear, Roy never intended to take the internships. The sole purpose of applying for those internships and using the tool during tests was to prove that their process was broken,” Neel said, adding, “We wanted to challenge the use of LeetCode-style interviews in the big tech recruiting process.”

For good measure, Roy even posted a video of how he did it with the Amazon process. After the post gathered traction, an Amazon executive allegedly told Columbia University to take action. That is when it blew up. On the one side was the notion of fairness and on the other, Neel and Roy’s bold and controversial pitch encouraging peers to “cheat” – but the youngsters don’t follow that framing.

“In an actual computer science job, software engineers use ChatGPT and AI for everything that they do. We think that it's crazy that the interview process is riddles and rote memorisation, and reflects nothing from the actual job. We don't think it is cheating; [we are just exposing] a ridiculous process,” Neel said.

The university did not buy the argument and initiated disciplinary action against them. Neel dropped out in February before the proceedings moved forward, while Roy was suspended at the end of the hearings.

When asked about the disciplinary proceedings, Neel said they had gone through Columbia's handbook extensively to make sure they were in compliance with all policies.

“Columbia University sent us notices about the app development citing that it violates academic honesty, which was just blatantly untrue… We both strongly feel like the disciplinary hearings were not warranted, and they were disciplining something that they did not have the authority to discipline,” he said.

Media in the US reported that the university refused to comment citing student privacy laws.

Neel's father Ponnarasu Shanmugam (57) is from Kovilpatti in Thoothukudi, and moved to Texas for grad school, while his mother Hemamalini Ramar (50) from Periyakulam in Theni went there after grad school. He is a director (software engineer) in Nokia while she is a software engineer in the managerial level in Raytheon. His 19-year-old sister Nikita Shanmugam is a pre-med freshman student at Rice University, Texas.

How did the Indian and Korean (in the case of Roy) families, two cultures that are typically strict about academics, react to the whole drama?

“My parents were sceptical at first, but they are supportive of the impact that I want to have with a startup, and they are very, very supportive of me following my passions in life. Roy's parents had similar views,” Neel said.

Whatever lingering doubts they may have had might have been removed by the $5.3 million seed funding that Cluely raised from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures. Earlier this month, the startup reportedly crossed $3 million in annual recurring revenue.

Speaking about the future that they envisage for the tool, Neel said Cluely is intended to be a desktop assistant to offer the services of AI for every digital interaction. “In the future, we hope to expand to other form factors as hardware gets better (smart glasses, brain-computer interfaces, etc.).”

“We believe in AI maximalism - everywhere that AI can be used and will be helpful, it should be used.”

So, is it cheating to use InterviewCoder? In a social media post, the startup pointed out how using calculators, spell-check, and Google were also once termed cheating.

“What we aim to do is redefine the word cheat. Cluely will be such a seamless experience [which is so good] that it feels like it's cheating. And it will bring us to a world where we offload tasks to AI and can focus on our opinions, thoughts, tastes, and what truly makes us human,” Neel said.

Not all may agree, but that is as compelling an argument as any.