Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/25 – Never Wear A Suit In Tech

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

AI is transforming job search on both sides of the equation. A first court ruling on using copyrighted books to train AI. New AI releases from Google devs will want to know about. How your kids 3rd grade teacher is using AI. And why did Apple push an ad to everybody? Sponsors: Shopify.com/ride Links: Employers Are Buried in A.I.-Generated Résumés (NYTimes) CareerBuilder + Monster to Sell Businesses in Bankruptcy (WSJ) Exclusive: Uber and Palantir alums raise $35M to disrupt corporate recruitment with AI (Fortune) Anthropic wins a major fair use victory for AI — but it’s still in trouble for stealing books (The Verge) Google unveils Gemini CLI, an open-source AI tool for terminals (TechCrunch) How ChatGPT and other AI tools are changing the teaching profession (AP) iPhone customers upset by Apple Wallet ad pushing ‘F1’ movie (TechCrunch) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Well, welcome to the Tech meme right home for Wednesday, June 25th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. AI is transforming job search on both sides of the equation. A first court ruling on using copyrighted books to train AI. New AI releases from Google that devs will want to know about. How your kid's third grade teacher is probably using AI.

And why did Apple push an ad to everybody? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Look, sometimes the roulette wheel of headlines piles things on top of you. each other, and today is one of those days. I should start by acknowledging the fact that, of course, my first ever company was Resumayriders.com. But forgive me, we're going to talk about AI and resumes and hiring. The top story on tech meme all morning was a piece from the Times about the surge in AI-generated resumes that is starting to overwhelm employers who are then turning to AI screening and video interviewing tools to assess responses and rank candidates, basically having to deal with the deluge of applications. Quite this.

the arms race at the moment. Quote, the number of applications submitted on LinkedIn has surged more than 45% in the past year. The platform is clocking an average of 11,000 applications per minute, and generative artificial intelligence tools are contributing to the deluge. With a simple prompt, chat GPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI will insert every keyword from a job description into a resume. Some candidates are going a step further, paying for AI agents that can autonomously find jobs and apply on their behalf. Recruiters say it's getting harder to tell who is genuinely qualified or interested, and many of the resumes look suspiciously similar. It's an applicant tsunami that's just going to get bigger, said

Huang Li, a former recruiter who writes a widely read newsletter about the industry. Enter the AI arms race. One popular method for navigating the surge, automatic chat or video interviews, sometimes conducted by AI. Chipotle's chief executive, Scott Boatwright, said at a conference this month that its AI chatbot screening and scheduling tool named Avocado, I guess avocato, has reduced hiring time by 75%. HireView, a popular AI video interview platform offers recruiters an option to have AI assess responses and rank candidates. But candidates can also use AI to cheat in these interviews, and some companies have added more automated skill assessments early in the hiring process. For example, HireView offers AI-powered games to gauge

abilities like pattern recognition and working memory and a virtual tryout that tests emotional intelligence or skills like counting change. Sometimes Lee said we end up with an AI versus AI type of situation. Some recruiters say that posting increasingly isn't worth it. To address that problem, LinkedIn recently added tools to help both candidates and recruiters narrow their focus, including an AI agent introduced in October that can write follow-up messages, conduct screening chats with candidates, suggest top applicants, and search for potential hires using natural language. The problem is less that candidates are using AI, a skill many employers say they want, than it is that they're being sloppy. Alexa Marciano, the managing

director of Syndicate Blue, a recruiting agency, said job seekers were reacting to recruiters' use of automated screening. It's really frustrating for the candidates because they spent all this time creating very catered covered letters, very catered resumes, she said. Jeremy Schifling, a career coach who regularly conducts technology-focused job search training at university said he could see this back and forth going on for a while. As students get more desperate, they say, well, I have no choice but to up the ante with these paid tools to automate everything. And I'm sure the recruiters are going to raise the bar again. He argues the end game will be authenticity from both sides. But he said, I do think that a lot of people are going to waste a lot of time, a lot of processing

power, a lot of money until we reach that realization, end quote. So, as I said, pile on. Here comes the pylon. If you're old enough to remember, there was a time when the big player in the job search space was Monster.com. It eventually got sort of supplanted by CareerBuilder.com, but then both of those sort of lived on as zombie brands for the last decade or so, and they joined forces. And now, well, the combined company, CareerBuilder Plus Monster, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is agreeing to sell its job board to Jobget and sell its other businesses as well. quoting the journal. Monster media properties, which include fastweb.com and military.com, would be sold to Valnet,

and Monster government services, which provide software to state and local governments, would be sold to Valsoft. CareerBuilder is actively cutting costs across its U.S. businesses and evaluating strategic options for certain international divisions, the company said. Like many others in the industry, our business has been affected by a challenging and uncertain macroeconomic environment, Jeff Furman, Chief Executive of Career Builders said on Tuesday, job get, Valnet, and Valsoff will serve as stocking horse or lead bidders in a court-supervised sale process subject to higher and better offers. Career Builder says it plans to pay its vendors in its U.S. businesses in full in the normal course during its bankruptcy proceedings. Last year, Randstad and V, the world's largest employment agency, formed a joint venture

between its Monster Job Board business and Apollo Portfolio Company Career Builder, end quote. There was a time around the great financial crisis, Resumaywriters.com was the company that powered Career Builders resume service. Bit of personal history there. But the pylon continues. So, AI is supercharging the job search space and maybe not in great ways. Well, it's probably startups like this that are doing the AI injection. MetaView, which builds AI tools to automate hiring, including interview note-taking

and generating job descriptions, raised a $35 million series B led by GV. Quoting Fortune, MetaVue's full suite of AI tools. aims to streamline and enhance every stage of the hiring process. The company's flagship product is an AI note-taking app for recruiters and hiring managers that records, analyzes, and summarizes job interviews, but it's also working on AI reports, a customizable reporting engine for optimizing the hiring funnel. Also, AI answers and always-on assistant that delivers instant information about any candidate job or hiring detail, and AI job posts, which generates and maintains job descriptions so teams

can launch new searches in seconds rather than days. MetaView says its customers, which include Sony, Breckx, 11 Labs and Deliveroo, save 30 minutes after every job interview and up to two hours per job post. While other companies offer similar note-taking services, Magus sees MetaVue as protected from threats from general purpose tools like Microsoft Copilot through its specialization in recruitment workflows. MetaVue integrates directly with recruiting tools such as applicant tracking systems and is designed to understand the specific context of recruiting conversations. Magus says specialized data and domain-specific post-training allows MetaVew's AI tools to

generate far more accurate and relevant summaries, end quote. And finally, another one, another pile on Paraform, which operates a hiring marketplace with AI-powered candidate relationship management and other tools, raised a $20 million series A, led by Felicit Ventures. A U.S. judge ruled yesterday that Anthropics use of copyrighted books to train their AI models was fair use, but Anthropic storage of pirated books and a central library use for training was not. Quoting the verge, it's a first of its kind ruling in favor of the AI industry, but it's importantly limited specifically to physical books anthropic purchased and digitized. Judge William Alsop of the Northern District of California also says in his decision

that the company must face a separate trial for pirating millions of books from the internet. The decision also does not address whether the outputs of an AI model infringe copyrights, which is at issue in other related cases. The lawsuit was filed by writers, Andrea Barts, Charles Graber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who sued Anthropic last year over claims the company trained its family of clawed AI models on pirated material. It's a pivotal decision that could affect how judges respond to AI copyright cases going forward. The ruling also addresses Anthropics move to purchase print copies of books, rip off their bindings, cut the pages, and scan them into a centralized digital library used to train its AI models. The judge ruled that digitizing a legally purchased physical book was fair use, and that using those digital copies to train an LLM was sufficiently transformative to also be fair use.

Authors complain is no different than it would be if they complained that training schoolchildren to write well would result in explosion of competing works, Judge Alsup writes, adding that the Copyright Act, quote, seeks to advance original works of authorship not to protect authors against competition. Despite these wins for Anthropic, Judge Alsup writes that Anthropics decision to store millions of pirated book copies in the company's central library, even if some weren't used for training, isn't considered fair use at all. This order doubts that any accused infringer could ever meet its burden of explaining why downloading source copies from pirate sites that it could have purchased or otherwise access lawfully was itself reasonably necessary

to any subsequent fair use. Alsup writes emphasis his. Judge Alsup says the court will hold a separate trial on the pirated content used by Anthropic, which will determine the resulting damages. We are pleased that the court recognized that using works to train LLMs was transformative, spectacularly so, Anthropic spokesperson Jennifer Martinez said in an email statement to the verge. Consistent with copyright's purpose in enabling

creativity and fostering scientific progress, Anthropics LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them, but to turn a hard corner and create something different, end quote. Google has launched Gemini-Cly, an agentic AI tool that lets developers make natural language requests in terminals by connecting Gemini models to local code bases. Quoting TechCrunch, Gemini-Cly is part of Google's efforts to get developers using its AI

models in their coding workflows. Google now offers an array of AI coding tools such as Gemini Code Assist and its asynchronous AI coding assistant jewels. However, Gemini CLI competes directly with other command line AI tools such as OpenAI's Codex CLI and Anthropics Cod Code, tools that tend to be easier to integrate faster and more efficient than other AI coding tools. Since Google launched Gemini 2.5 Pro in April, the company's AI models have become a favorite among developers. The popularity of Gemini 2.5 Pro has driven usage of third-party AI coding tools such as Cursor and GitHub co-pilot, which have become massive businesses. In response, Google has tried in recent months to build a direct relationship with these developers

by offering in-house products. While most people will use Gemini CLI for coding, the company says it designed the tool to handle other tasks as well. Developers can tap Gemini CLI to create videos with Google's V-O-3 model, generate research reports with the company's deep research agent, or access real-time information through Google Search. Google also says Gemini-Cly can connect to MCP servers, allowing developers to connect to external databases. To encourage adoption, Google is also open-sourcing Gemini-CLY under the Apache 2.0 license, which is typically considered one of the most permissive.

The company says it expects a network of developers to contribute to the project on GitHub. Google is also offering generous usage limits to spur adoption. of Gemini CLI, free users can make 60 model requests per minute and a thousand requests per day, which the company says is roughly double the average number of requests developers made when using the tool, end quote. More bit of news devs. Also, Imagine 4 is now available in the Gemini API and Google AI Studio priced at $0.4 per image or $0.6 per image for the ultra model that, quote, precisely follows instructions. Back to this idea of AI becoming an arms race, on one end, users are using AI, which is forcing folks on the other side of the table to use

AI just to keep up with their use of AI. According to a new Gallup poll, 60% of 2,232 teachers polled at USK through 12 public schools say they used AI tools in the 2024-2020-school year. Regulars estimate weekly time savings by using these tools at 5.9 hours. Putting the AP. For her sixth grade, class math teacher Anna Sepulveda wanted to make geometry fun. She figured her students who live and breathe soccer would be interested to learn how mathematical concepts apply to the sport. She asked chat GPT for help. Within seconds, the chatbot delivered a five-page lesson plan, even offering a theme. Geometry is everywhere in soccer, on the field, in the ball, and even in the design of stadiums.

It explained the place of shapes and angles on a soccer field. It suggested classroom conversation starters? Why are those shapes important to the game? It proposed a project for students to design their own soccer field or stadium using rulers and protractors. Using AI has been a game changer for me, said Sepulveda, who teaches at a dual-language school in Dallas and has Chat-Gy-T-translate everything into Spanish. It's helping me with lesson planning, communicating with parents, and increasing student engagement. Across the country, artificial intelligence tools are changing the teaching profession as educators use them to help write quizzes and worksheets, design lessons, assist with grading, and reduce paperwork.

By freeing up their time, many say the technology has made them better at their jobs. About two dozen states have state-level AI guidance for schools, but the extent to which it is applied by schools and teachers is uneven, says Maya Israel, an associate professor of educational technology and computer science education at the University of Florida. We want to make sure that AI isn't replacing the judgment of a teacher, Israel said. If teachers are using chapouts for grading, they should be aware the tools are good for low-level grading, like multiple choice tests, but less effective. when nuance is required. There should be a way for students to alert teachers if the grading is too harsh or inconsistent, and the final grading decision needs to remain with the educator, she said. About 8 and 10 teachers who use AI tools say it saves them time on work tasks like making worksheets, assessments, quizzes, or on administrative work. About 6 and 10 teachers who use AI tools say they are improving the quality of their work when it comes to modifying student materials or giving student feedback.

AI has transformed how I teach. It's also transformed my weekends and given me a better work-life balance, says Mary McCarthy, a high school social studies teacher in the Houston area who has used AI tools for help with lesson plans and other tasks, end quote. Apple has been weathering a backlash this week from iPhone owners after the Apple Wallet app pushed a notification that promoted a $10 discount at Fandango for tickets to Apple's new F1 movie. Quoting TechCrunch. The feature film starring Brad Pitt explores the world of Formula One and was shot at actual Grand Prix races.

It also showcases the use of Apple technology from the custom-made cameras made of iPhone parts used to film inside of the cars to the AirPods Max that Pitt's character F1 driver Sunny Hayes sleeps in. However well-received, the film may be, iPhone users don't necessarily want their built-in utilities like their digital wallet, marketing the film to them. I did not pay over $1,000 for an iPhone to get advertised at complained what Reddit user U underscore Captain 42D. Another recent post, already with dozens of replies, wants to know how to turn off Apple Pay ads.

As it turns out, there's a new option in iOS 26's beta build to disable offers and promotions from Apple Wallet. That isn't available in the current release. Instead, users not on the new beta build only have the option to disable notifications or to turn off seeing card benefits within wallet during checkout. They can't opt out of offers. The addition of the new control toggle in iOS 26 suggests that. that Apple plans to push more marketing messages and promotions through the wallet app in the future,

something many iPhone users won't appreciate. Apple customers are generally averse to advertisements and marketing efforts pushed to their devices without their consent. In the past, they've pushed back at ads for Apple services in their iOS settings, for example, and over 10 years later, people are still complaining about the U2 album that automatically appeared in their iTunes music library. Recalling that marketing debacle, one Reddit user writes of the new wallet push notification for F1, I am getting Bono.

flashbacks, end quote. Back to that whole death of monster and career builder thing. I don't know if I've ever told this story on the show before, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself. But if you were there back in the day, you'll remember another big player in the job search space was hot jobs. The first time I ever came to New York City was to pitch hot jobs on making resume writers their premier resume service provider. I was like 20, 21 years old. I didn't know from business stuff at all. So I fly in. I head over. to their offices at the Star at Lehigh building on the far west side of Chelsea. That was one of the big buildings for dot-com startups back in those days. I think a third of the tenants at that point were

dot-com companies. And I show up in like the suit that I wore to my grandmother's funeral. Point is, I wore a suit. I was the only one in that whole office, probably that whole building wearing a suit. Even in those dot-com late 90s days, no one in tech dressed business style. I looked like what I was, a kid playing dress-up. Suffice to say, I did not get the deal, so to this day, I never wear a suit for business. Most you'll ever see me in is a blazer and jeans, but that's it. No dressing up to do business in tech, lesson learned. Talk to you tomorrow.