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Nearly a decade after announcing grand plans for 30-minute drone delivery of items up to 5 pounds, Amazon told CNBC it’s now completed just 100 deliveries in two small U.S. markets.

Compare that number with internal projections from January for 10,000 deliveries by the end of this year, according to a video address in early 2023. Days after Amazon set its target, a significant number of Prime Air workers were let go as part of the largest round of layoffs in company history. 

Now, Amazon’s 2023 goals have changed, the company said, pointing to regulatory hurdles put in place by the Federal Aviation Administration.

“While the FAA broadened Prime Air’s authority to conduct drone deliveries to include sites in California and Texas, the phased process for expanding our service areas is taking longer than we anticipated,” said Av Zammit, an Amazon spokesperson.

CNBC went to Lockeford, California, a 4,000-person town and one of the two U.S. markets where the company’s drone program is operating. Amazon said it started drone deliveries there in December, but there was no apparent aerial activity at the former concrete manufacturing warehouse that now serves as the unit’s local hub.

“I would love to see the drones flying around. I can’t wait,” said Ken Thomas, who co-owns a nearby deli that’s served lunch to some Amazon employees. “I haven’t seen any yet.”

Thomas added, “One guy said they had 14 customers signed up, which seems kind of low to me.”

Amazon said thousands of people “have expressed interest” in the program and that the company is “working with each one of them to make this a reality.”

Company employees previously told CNBC that the drones are only delivering to two homes in Lockeford, located next door to each other less than a mile from the warehouse. The employees asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak on the matter.

Main Street of Lockeford, California, on April 14, 2023. The 4,000-person town is one of two small markets where Amazon started gradual drone deliveries in December 2022.

Katie Tarasov

But where Amazon has stalled, other companies’ drone programs have seen greater traction, particularly those that started outside of the regulatory confines of the U.S.

CNBC visited Wing, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, at a drone test facility in Hollister, California. At one point, there were 37 drones in the air at once making demo deliveries.

Wing CEO Adam Woodworth said it’s made 330,000 deliveries. While thousands of those have been for partners such as Walgreens in Virginia and Texas, the company primarily delivers in Australia, where it brings orders from DoorDash and the supermarket Coles to homes in more than 50 suburbs. 

“The service area that we cover there is between 70,000 and 100,000 people and it’s a relatively sort of geographically constrained location,” Woodworth said. “If you look at metrics from last year, we were seeing on the order of about 1,000-plus deliveries a day to that sort of one snapshot of the planet.”

Wing CEO Adam Woodworth shows the Alphabet company’s delivery drone to CNBC’s Katie Tarasov on April 25, 2023, in Hollister, California.

Andrew Evers

CNBC also got a glimpse of Walmart drone deliveries in its home state of Arkansas, with partner Zipline, which recently announced its fixed-wing aircraft has made 600,000 commercial deliveries, largely of medical supplies in Africa. In March, Zipline unveiled a far different model that lowers a “droid” to the ground by a tether.

A growing list of companies, including Sweetgreen and nutrition retailer GNC, have signed up to deliver with the new drone when it’s scheduled to come online in 2024.

“We operate in three states: North Carolina, Arkansas and Utah,” said Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton. “For some of the families in those states that we serve day in and day out, not only is drone delivery a thing, not only is it possible, it’s also now boring.”

Brandey Oliver, a Zipline customer in Pea Ridge, Arkansas, said she likes the services because they’re secure.

“If we’re not here and we get a delivery, nobody has access to our backyard,” said Oliver, who lives about 10 miles from Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville. “It really helps in emissions, and global warming has me worried. So I like it that no delivery cars are used.”

DroneUp is another Walmart partner with financial backing from the retailer. CEO Tom Walker said its drones have made more than 110,000 deliveries in the U.S. DroneUp cut some jobs this week, in a shift to focus more on consumer delivery and away from enterprise services such as construction and real estate monitoring.

“We have 34 locations operating in six states today, and we’re delivering in less than 30 minutes,” Walker said. “The routes are designed to minimize flight over people, minimize flight over moving vehicles, and it chooses the optimum route both from a safety standpoint, but from an efficiency standpoint.”

Walmart said it made more than 6,000 drone deliveries across seven states in 2022 with DroneUp, Zipline and a third partner, Flytrex.

‘Most complex airspace in the world’

Reese Mozer has been in the drone industry for 14 years and remembers when Amazon’s then-CEO Jeff Bezos first announced Prime Air drone delivery on CBS’ “60 Minutes” in December 2013. 

“Those of us who were in the industry at that time could foresee many of the challenges that were coming to actually fulfill that vision,” said Mozer, now president of Ondas Holdings, which owns several drone companies such as Airobotics. “You know, delivering packages via drone is a very complicated problem because what we’re talking about is theoretically thousands of autonomous drones carrying packages over people’s heads, avoiding structures, avoiding other air traffic. And this is a particularly difficult problem in the United States because we have the busiest and most complex airspace in the world.”

In 2020, Amazon brought in former Boeing executive David Carbon to lead Prime Air. He announced the program’s first official deliveries on LinkedIn on Christmas Eve 2022. 

“It’s actually not that hard to deliver a package via drone,” Carbon said at an Amazon event in November. “It’s a very different problem space to design, build, certify and operate an autonomous safety-critical system that can operate over densely populated environments within the national airspace.”

Safety, Amazon said, remains its top priority. There have been multiple crashes at Amazon’s test site in Pendleton, Oregon, including one in 2021 that sparked a 20-acre brush fire. In a statement, Amazon said that Pendleton is “a closed testing facility where the intent is to learn the limits of our technology” and that it’s “never had an incident during an actual customer delivery flight.”

Amazon’s drone design has evolved significantly over the years. It started as a vertical lifting “octocopter” with eight exposed rotors, and then moved to a design with four large enclosed rotors. Then came a version that could take off vertically and fly forward like a plane.

The latest design was first unveiled in 2019. It’s now on its second iteration: the MK27-2, which is about 5.5 feet wide and weighs about 80 pounds. In an interview in November, Prime Air’s Calsee Hendrickson, who leads product and program management, said the technology onboard for safety features is what makes the MK27-2 bigger.

“If the drone encounters another aircraft when it’s flying, it’ll fly around that other aircraft,” Hendrickson said. “If when it gets to its delivery location, your dog runs underneath the drone, we won’t deliver the package.”

Amazon’s VP of Prime Air David Carbon showcased the current MK27-2 drone in Westborough, Massachusetts, on Nov. 10, 2022.

Erin Black

The FAA takes these types of safety features into consideration when companies such as Amazon apply for Part 135 air carrier certification, which allows drones to make commercial deliveries. Only five drone operators have been granted such certification: Wing and UPS in 2019, Amazon in 2020, Zipline in 2022, and Flytrex partner Causey Aviation Unmanned in 2023.

But there are multiple levels of Part 135 clearance. Prime Air drones, along with most other delivery drones, operate with a number of federal exemptions that greatly restrict where and how they can fly. For example, most delivery drones have to avoid active roadways and people. The FAA also greatly limits operations of drones beyond the visual line of sight of an observer. Beyond visual line of sight, or BVLOS, while meant to ensure a human can steer away from other aircraft that could cause a crash, is also perhaps the biggest current obstacle to drone delivery scalability.

When asked how many of Wing’s resources were going toward BVLOS, Woodworth said, “I would say all, right?” He added, “Otherwise, what’s the point of using an airplane?”

Introduced in February, the Increasing Competitiveness for American Drones Act of 2023 would streamline the BVLOS approvals process. For now, the restriction often means drones can fly only one or two miles from the takeoff spot and require extra people to watch each flight.

“That person is getting paid to stand there, watch that drone, and that all factors into the cost,” said Jeremiah Karpowicz, editorial director of Commercial UAV News. “Very quickly you see that’s not going to make sense.”

One way to get FAA clearance for BVLOS is with a “detect and avoid” system, or what Amazon calls sense-and-avoid. The idea is to identify moving objects such as other aircraft, people and pets, and static objects such as a chimney or a clothesline, and automatically steer clear of them. These systems often use cameras, which make it tough to operate in cloudy conditions or at night.

Zipline uses microphones to listen for and automatically avoid other aircraft. The FAA recently certified Zipline’s detect and avoid system so its drones can fly beyond visual line of sight and over populated areas.

“Zipline achieved 40 million commercial autonomous miles with zero human safety incidents before we sought certification in the U.S.,” Rinaudo Cliffton said.

In late 2021, Amazon wrote to the FAA about the safety features on the MK27-2 in hopes the regulator would remove some restrictions. But a year later, the FAA declined Amazon’s request, saying the company didn’t provide sufficient data to show the MK27-2 could operate safely over people, roads or structures.

Amazon moved forward anyway, though gradually, in Lockeford and in College Station, Texas. Amazon said the two markets were chosen because of their demographics and topography. 

“The FAA cares about two things,” Mozer said. “They care about you colliding with another aircraft and they care about you hurting someone on the ground. So if you are in a less populated area, that means there’s less people on the ground, less chance for injury. And there’s also probably just less air traffic.”

‘Horses are skittish’

Aside from clearing FAA hurdles, public acceptance remains a big obstacle facing the whole industry.

“The biggest public pushback is: What is that drone doing? It’s probably spying on me,” said Karpowicz.

In Lockeford, Thomas said that fear could cause problems.

“I did think some people might try to shoot it down,” he said.

All the drone companies we interviewed said their cameras don’t record or, if they do, the video isn’t made available to operators.

“The cameras on our aircraft are just for navigation,” said Wing’s Woodworth. “They just look straight down. They can’t move around and there’s no feedback to the operators, so they’re just used to help the plane figure out where it is.”

Some residents also worry the noise of drones will change the quiet rural feel of Lockeford.

“There’s a field with cows in it, and that’s just down the street from the Amazon warehouse,” Thomas said. “I don’t know if the cows will be bothered by the drones or not. Horses might be, though. Horses are skittish.”

Prime Air drones are not expected to exceed 58 decibels, according to an FAA assessment, about the noise level of an outdoor air conditioning unit. Woodworth said Wing’s drones stay under 55 decibels at cruising altitude. Zipline said its coming P2 model is even quieter.

“People completely hate the way that quadcopters and octocopters sound,” Rinaudo Cliffton said. “It’s super annoying. It sounds like an angry swarm of bees and there is zero chance that communities are going to accept that kind of an experience scaling up and becoming something that you have to listen to multiple times a day.”

For some companies, weather remains another hindrance to reliable delivery. DroneUp had to cancel flights due to wind on the day we visited the company in Arkansas. Earlier that morning, Zipline made two deliveries.

A drone operator loads a Walmart package into Zipline’s P1 fixed-wing drone for delivery to a customer home in Pea Ridge, Arkansas, on March 30, 2023.

Bunee Tomlinson

“We fly in really crazy rain storms, lightning storms, dust storms,” Rinaudo Cliffton said. “We fly in wind that is so strong that sometimes the aircraft is actually moving backwards relative to the ground. That is a gigantic engineering challenge. It’s taken us seven years of hardening every part of the system.”

Wing said its drones can operate in sustained winds above 20 knots and moderate rain. Amazon said the MK27-2 flies in clear, dry weather and can handle sustained winds up to 14 knots. 

Now Amazon is working on its next model, the MK30, meant to better handle high temperatures and rain and to fly further. It’s also supposed to be lighter, smaller and half as loud.

But user demand remains the big question.

“I’m still trying to figure out what exactly the benefit or the perk of the drone program would be,” said Audrey Tankersley, who was having lunch in Lockeford at Thomas’ deli the day of our visit.

Customers in Lockeford and College Station told CNBC that Amazon incentivizes them to order drone deliveries by offering them gift cards. Amazon said it was consumer demand that drove the program from the start.

“They’re excited about this,” Hendrickson said. “And that’s what Amazon does: We listen to our customers and then we work backwards to design the most efficient service that we can.”

It’s a challenging time for the market, as regulation and a slowing economy forced some downsizing and delayed plans. But those on the inside remain optimistic.

“I wish everybody else in the space the best luck,” Woodworth said. “Because I want the space to exist.”

Watch the video to learn more about how Amazon fell behind in drone delivery: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/05/17/at-100-deliveries-amazon-drones-fall-far-behind-google-and-walmart.html

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Bitcoin falls over 5% as volatility continues after Trump’s bitcoin reserve plan

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8 hours ago

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March 10, 2025

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Bitcoin falls over 5% as volatility continues after Trump's bitcoin reserve plan

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Bitcoin fell on Monday as volatility in the price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency continues following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump to create a strategic bitcoin reserve for the United States.

Bitcoin was trading at $81,712, down over 5% but off earlier lows, at 9:42 a.m. Singapore time, according to Coin Metrics.

The reserve will be funded by coins that have been seized in criminal and civil forfeiture cases and there are no plans for the U.S. government to buy more bitcoin. After the strategic reserve announcement last Thursday, crypto prices declined as investors were disappointed it wasn’t a more aggressive program.

Other cryptocurrency prices also dropped on Monday. Both ether and XRP were down about 7.5% at around 9:43 a.m. Singapore time.

Some investors, however, said the move to establish a reserve was bullish in the long-term.

“I absolutely think the market has this wrong,” Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday. “The market is short-term disappointed” that the government didn’t say it was immediately going to start acquiring 100,000 or 200,000 bitcoin, he added.

Hougan pointed towards comments on X from White House Crypto and AI Czar David Sacks, who said the U.S. would look for “budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies have no incremental costs on American taxpayers.”

“I think the right question to ask is: did this executive order make it more likely that in the future, bitcoin will be a geopolitically important currency or asset? Will other governments look to follow the U.S.’s lead and build their own strategic reserve? And to me, the answer to that is emphatically yes,” Hougan said.

“The reason that questions matters is that’s the question that determines if bitcoin is $80,000 a coin or $1 million a coin.”

Hougan called the decline in crypto prices a “short-term setback.”

“I think the market will soon find its footing and realize that actually this is incredibly bullish long term for this asset and for crypto as a whole,” he said.

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Meet the 21-year-old helping coders use AI to cheat in Google and other tech job interviews

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19 hours ago

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March 9, 2025

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Meet the 21-year-old helping coders use AI to cheat in Google and other tech job interviews

A person walks past the entrance to a Google building in Dublin, Feb. 15, 2023.

Artur Widak | Anadolu | Getty Images

After landing internship offers from Amazon, Meta and TikTok, computer science student Chungin “Roy” Lee has decided to move to San Francisco.

But he won’t be joining any of those companies.

Instead, Lee will be building his own startup that offers a peculiar service: helping software engineers use artificial intelligence to cheat in their technical job interviews. 

“Everyone programs nowadays with the help of AI,” said Lee, a 21-year-old student at Columbia University, which has opened disciplinary proceedings against him, according to documents viewed by CNBC. A Columbia spokesperson said the university doesn’t comment on individual students.

“It doesn’t make sense to have an interview format that assumes you don’t have the use of AI,” Lee said.

Lee is at the forefront of a movement among professional coders who are exploiting the limitations of remote job interviews, popularized during the Covid pandemic, by using AI tools off camera to ensure they give hiring managers the best possible answers. 

The hiring process that took hold in the work-from-home era involved candidates interviewing from behind a Zoom screen rather than traveling, sometimes across the country, for on-location interviews, where they could show their coding skills on dry-erase boards.

In late 2022 came the boom in generative AI, with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Since then, tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of programmers while touting the use of AI to write code. At Google, for example, more than 25% of new code is written by AI, CEO Sundar Pichai told investors in October.

The combination of rapid advancements in AI, mass layoffs of software developers, and a continuing world of remote and hybrid work has created a novel conundrum for recruiters.

The problem has become so prevalent that Pichai suggested during a Google town hall in February that his hiring managers consider returning to in-person job interviews.

Google isn’t the only tech company weighing that idea.

But engineers aren’t slowing down.  

Lee has turned his cheating into a business. His company, Interview Coder, markets itself as a service that helps software developers cheat during job interviews. The internship offers that he landed are the proof he uses to show that his technology works.

AI assistants for virtual interviews can provide written code, make code improvements, and generate detailed explanations of results that candidates can read. The AI tools all work quickly, which is helpful for timed interviews.

Hiring managers are venting their frustrations on social media over the rise of AI cheaters, saying that those who get caught are eliminated from contention. Interviewers say they’re exhausted from having to discern whether candidates are using their own skills or relying on AI.

Clara Shih, head of business AI at Meta, on the 'agentic' future of the economy

‘Invisible’ help

The cheating tools rely on generative AI models to provide software engineers with real-time answers to coding problems as they’re presented during interviews. The AI analyzes both written and oral questions and instantaneously generates code. The widgets can also provide the cheaters with explanations for the solutions that they can use in the interview. 

The tools’ most valuable feature, however, might be their secrecy. Interview Coder is invisible to the interviewer.

While candidates are using technology to cheat, employers are observing their behavior during interviews to try to catch them. Interviewers have learned to look for eyes wandering to the side, the reflection of other apps visible on candidates’ glasses, and answers that sound rehearsed or don’t match questions, among other clues.

Perhaps the biggest tell is a simple “Hmm.”

Hiring managers said they’ve noticed that many candidates use the ubiquitous sound to buy themselves time while waiting for their AI tools to finish their work. 

“I’ll hear a pause, then ‘Hmm,’ and all of a sudden, it’s the perfect answer,” said Anna Spearman, founder of Techie Staffing, an agency that helps companies fill technical roles. “There have also been instances where the code looked OK, but they couldn’t describe how they came to the conclusion.”

Henry Kirk, a software developer and co-founder of Studio.init in New York, said this type of cheating used to be easy to catch.

“But now it’s harder to detect,” said Kirk. He said the technology has gotten smart enough to present the answers in a place that doesn’t require users to move their eyes.

“The eye movement used to be the biggest giveaway,” Kirk said. 

Interview Coder’s website says its virtual interview tool is immune to screen detection features that are available to companies on services such as Zoom and Google Meet. Lee markets his product as being webcam-proof.

When Kirk hosted a virtual coding challenge for an engineering job he was looking to fill in June, 700 people applied, he said. Kirk recorded the process of the first interview round. He was looking to see if any candidates were cheating in ways that included using results from large language models.

“More than 50% of them cheated,” he said.

AI cheating tools have improved so much over the last year that they’ve become nearly undetectable, experts said. Other than Lee’s Interview Coder, software engineers can also use programs such as Leetcode Wizard or ChatGPT. 

Kirk said his startup is considering moving to in-person interviews, though he knows that potentially limits the talent pool.

“The problem is now I don’t trust the results as much,” Kirk said. “I don’t know what else to do other than on-site.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai during an event at the Google for Startups Campus in Warsaw, Poland, Feb. 13, 2025.

Omar Marques | Anadolu | Getty Images

Back to the Googleplex

It’s become a big topic at Google, and one Pichai addressed in February at an internal town hall meeting, where executives read questions and comments that were submitted by employees and summarized by AI, according to an audio recording that was reviewed by CNBC.

One question asked of management was, “Can we get onsite job interviews back?”

“There are many email threads about this topic,” the question said. “If budget is constraint, can we get the candidates to an office or environment we can control?”

Pichai turned to Brian Ong, Google’s vice president of recruiting, who was joining through a virtual livestream.

“Brian, do we do hybrid?” Pichai asked.

Ong said candidates and Google employees have said they prefer virtual job interviews because scheduling a video call is easier than finding a time to meet in available conference rooms. The virtual interview process is about two weeks faster, he added.

He said interviewers are instructed to probe candidates on their answers as a way to decipher whether they actually know what they’re talking about.

“We definitely have more work to do to integrate how AI is now more prevalent in the interview process,” said Ong. He said his recruiting organization is working with Google’s software engineer steering committee to figure out how the company can refine its interviewing process. 

“Given we all work hybrid, I think it’s worth thinking about some fraction of the interviews being in person,” Pichai responded. “I think it’ll help both the candidates understand Google’s culture and I think it’s good for both sides.”

Ong said it’s also an issue “all of our other competitor companies are looking at.”

A Google spokesperson declined to comment beyond what was said at the meeting.

Other companies have already shifted their hiring practices to account for AI cheating. 

Deloitte reinstated in-person interviews for its U.K. graduate program, according to a September report. 

Anthropic, the maker of AI chatbot Claude, issued new guidance in its job applications in February, asking candidates not to use AI assistants during the hiring process. 

“While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process,” the new policy says. “We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate ‘Yes’ if you have read and agree.”

Amazon is also taking steps to combat AI cheating. 

The company asks that candidates acknowledge that they won’t use unauthorized tools during the interview or assessment process, spokesperson Margaret Callahan told CNBC.

Chungin “Roy” Lee, a 21-year-old student at Columbia University, is the founder of Interview Coder, a startup that makes software to help computer programmers cheat in job interviews with the help of AI.

Courtesy of Chungin Lee

‘F*ck Leetcode’

If you visit InterviewCoder.co, the first thing that greets you is large gray type that reads “F*ck Leetcode.”

Leetcode is the program used by many tech companies to evaluate software engineers for technical roles. Tech companies such as Meta, Google and Amazon use it to keep tabs on the thousands of job applicants they evaluate.

“Every time I mention interviews, I get frustrated comments about Leetcode,” wrote Ryan Peterman, a software engineer at Meta, in a newsletter posted on Substack in December. Peterman said Leetcode problems are purposely designed to be much harder than what software engineers would do on the job. Leetcode is the best tool companies have to filter hundreds of applicants, Peterman wrote.

Coders said they hate Leetcode because it emphasizes algorithmic problem-solving and asks applicants to solve riddles and puzzles that seem irrelevant to the job, according to those CNBC spoke with as well as comments CNBC found from engineers across various social media platforms. Another downside is that it sometimes requires hours of work that may not result in a job offer or advancement, they said.

Leetcode served as Lee’s inspiration for building Interview Coder, he said. With the help of AI, he said, he created the service in less than a week.

“I thought I wanted to work at a big tech company and spent 600 hours practicing for Leetcode,” Lee said. “It made me miserable, and I almost stopped programming because of how much I didn’t like it.”

Lee’s social media posts are filled with comments from other programmers expressing similar frustrations. 

“Legend,” several comments said in response to some of his X posts. Others said they enjoyed him “f—ing with big tech.” 

Rival software Leetcode Wizard was also inspired by distaste for Leetcode. 

Isabel De Vries, Leetcode Wizard’s head of marketing, told CNBC in a statement that Leetcode-style interviews fail to accurately measure engineering skills and fail to reflect actual daily engineering work. 

“Our product originates from the same frustrations many of our users are having,” De Vries said.

Leetcode did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Henry Kirk, a software developer and co-founder of Studio.init in New York, is considering moving job interviews to be on site in response to software engineers using AI to cheat in virtual interviews.

Photo by Krista Schlueter for Inc. Magazine

When Kirk, of Studio.init, posted on LinkedIn in February to vent about his frustrations with AI cheating, he received nearly 200 comments. But most argued that employers should allow candidates to use AI in the hiring process.

“Even the SAT lets you use a calculator,” said one comment. “I think you just make it harder to succeed on purpose when in the real world Google and gpt will always be at my fingertips.”

Lee promotes Interview Coder as being “invisible to all screen-recording softwares.” To prove its effectiveness, he recorded himself passing an Amazon interview and posted the video on YouTube. Amazon and the other companies that had made offers to Lee then rescinded them.

Lee got hundreds of comments praising the video, which YouTube removed after CNBC reached out to Amazon and Google for this story. YouTube cited a “copyright claim” by Amazon as the reason for removing the video.

“I as an interviewer am so annoyed by him but as a candidate also adore him,” former Meta staff engineer Yangshun Tay, co-founder of startup GreatFrontEnd, wrote in a LinkedIn post about Lee and his video. “Cheating isn’t right, but oh god I am so tired of these stupid algorithm interviews.”

After YouTube removed the video, Lee uploaded it once again.

Cheating as a service

Lee said he never planned to work at Amazon, Meta or TikTok. He said he wanted to show others just how easy it is to game Leetcode and force companies to find a better alternative.

And, he said, he’s making money in the process. 

Interview Coder is available as a subscription for $60 a month. Lee said the company is on track to hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue by mid-May.

He recently hired the internet influencers who go by the name “Costco Guys” to make a video marketing his software. 

“If you’re struggling to pass your Leetcode interviews and want to get a job at a big tech company, you’ve got to take a look at Interviewcoder.co to pass your interview,” the Costco Guys say in their video. “Because Interview Coder gets five big booms! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boooooom!”

Leetcode Wizard bills itself on its website as “The #1 AI-powered coding interview cheating app” and “The perfect tool for achieving a ‘Strong Hire’ result in any coding interview and landing your dream job at any FAANG company.” Leetcode Wizard charges 49 euros ($53) a month for a “Pro” subscription. 

More than 16,000 people have used the app, and “several hundred” people have told Leetcode Wizard that they received offers thanks to the software, the company told CNBC. 

“Our product will have succeeded once we can shut it down, when leetcode interviews are a thing of the past,” De Vries said. 

Lee said he’s moving from New York to San Francisco in March to continue building Interview Coder and start working on his next company.

Kirk said he understands software engineers’ frustration with Leetcode and the tech industry. He’s had to use Leetcode numerous times throughout his career, and he was laid off by Google in 2023. He now wants to help out-of-work engineers get jobs.

But he remains worried that AI cheating will persist.

“We need to make sure they know their stuff because these tools still make mistakes,” Kirk said. 

Half of companies currently use AI in the hiring process, and 68% will by the end of 2025, according to an October survey commissioned by ResumeBuilder.com.

Lee said that if companies want to bill themselves as AI-first, they should encourage its use by candidates.

Asked if he worries about software engineers losing the trust of the tech industry, Lee paused. 

“Hmm,” he mumbled.  

“My reaction to that is any company that is slow to respond to market changes will get hurt and that’s the fault of the company,” Lee said. “If there are better tools, then it’s their fault for not resorting to the better alternative to exist. I don’t feel guilty at all for not catering to a company’s inability to adapt.”

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How Facebook Marketplace is keeping young people on the platform

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2 days ago

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March 8, 2025

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How Facebook Marketplace is keeping young people on the platform

Meta‘s Facebook’s influence remains strong globally, but younger users are logging in less. Only 32% of U.S. teens use Facebook today, down from 71% in 2014, according to a 2024 Pew Research study. However, Facebook’s resale platform Marketplace is one reason young people are on the platform.

“I only use Facebook for Marketplace,” said Mirka Arevalo, a student at Buffalo University. “I go in knowing what I want, not just casually browsing.”

Launched in 2016, Facebook Marketplace has grown into one of Meta’s biggest success stories. With 1.1 billion users across 70 countries, it competes with eBay and Craigslist, according to BusinessDasher.

“Marketplace is the flea market of the internet,” said Charles Lindsay, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Buffalo. “There’s a massive amount of consumer-to-consumer business.”

Unlike eBay or Etsy, Marketplace doesn’t charge listing fees, and local pickups help avoid shipping costs, according to Facebook’s Help Center.

“Sellers love that Marketplace has no fees,” said Jasmine Enberg, VP and Principal Analyst at eMarketer. “Introducing fees could push users elsewhere.”

Marketplace also taps into the booming resale market, projected to hit $350 billion by 2027, according to ThredUp.

“Younger buyers are drawn to affordability and sustainability,” said Yoo-Kyoung Seock, a professor at the College of Family and Consumer Sciences at the University of Georgia. “Marketplace offers both.”

A key advantage is trust; users’ Facebook profiles make transactions feel safer than on anonymous platforms like Craigslist, according to Seock.

In January 2025, eBay partnered with Facebook Marketplace, allowing select eBay listings to appear on Marketplace in the U.S., Germany, and France. Analysts project this will drive an additional $1.6 billion in sales for eBay by the end of 2025, according to Wells Fargo.

“This partnership boosts the number of buyers and sellers,” said Enberg. “It could also solve some of Marketplace’s trust issues.”

While Facebook doesn’t charge listing fees, it does take a 10% cut of sales made through its shipping service, according to Facebook’s Help Center.

Marketplace isn’t a major direct revenue source, but it keeps users engaged.

“It’s one of the least monetized parts of Facebook,” said Enberg. “But it brings in engagement, which advertisers value.”

Meta relies on ads for over 97% of its $164.5 billion revenue in 2024.

“Marketplace helps Meta prove younger users still log in,” said Enberg. “Even if they’re buying and selling instead of scrolling.”

By keeping users engaged, Marketplace plays a key role in Facebook’s long-term strategy, ensuring the platform remains relevant in a changing digital landscape.

Watch the video to learn more.

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