Passengers ride in an electric Waymo full self-driving technology in Santa Monica
Allen J. Schaben | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
Waymo, Alphabet‘s self-driving car unit, is having a relatively good couple of months – at least, compared to one of its key rivals: GM‘s Cruise.
Formerly known as the Google self-driving car project and now an independent subsidiary of Google parent-company Alphabet, Waymo has been operating in some capacity since 2009. Five years ago, the company launched what it billed as the “world’s first commercial autonomous ride-hailing service” in the metro Phoenix area, then last year expanded to San Francisco. The company soon plans to launch commercially in Austin, its fourth city, and also recently began test-driving vehicles in the winter weather of Buffalo, New York.
For much of this time, Cruise has seemed to be competing neck-and-neck: When Waymo raised funding at a $30 billion valuation in 2020, Cruise followed in 2021 with the same valuation. When Cruise began offering fully autonomous rides in San Francisco in the winter of 2022, Waymo followed in the fall. In August, California regulators voted to approve round-the-clock robotaxi service in San Francisco from both companies, making it the first major U.S. city to allow two robotaxi companies to compete for service “at all hours of day or night.”
Amid the news, Waymo’s chief product officer, Saswat Panigrahi, told CNBC that the self-driving car unit hasn’t seen a change in tone from regulators or a shift in the company’s public perception.
Obviously, Waymo seems to be performing better than some competitors. What, exactly, do you think you’ve been doing differently?
There are no shortcuts. I mean, this is not a question you’re asking an app or a web page, which is giving you an answer. This is a multi-thousand pound vehicle that’s moving through the physical world – yes, it’s an application of AI but a very different kind of application of AI. And there’s something to be said about time and experience and just rigor that no matter how hard you work, it takes time to do this.
So I would say that the amount of data you’ve tested yourself against – you could always test more, but the staggering scale of testing that has been brought to bear – I sometimes say that building the Waymo Driver is a hard thing, but it’s almost as hard to evaluate the Driver. The amount of simulation we have had to do… has taken a decade. It took Google’s level of infrastructure because even to simulate at that scale, as you and I are speaking right now, 25,000 vehicles in our simulator are learning to drive better. To bring that, you need incredible infrastructure capability because even if you had the AI capability, without the infrastructure, it’d be very hard to bring that skill to bear – a decade of investment into AI before AI was cool.
Compute infrastructure, to power those simulations?
Yeah, some of it is just raw scale of compute, how many computers can you bring to bear, that kind of thing. But some of it is also – think of the old-school video game versus how realistic video games have become now, that’s a metaphor for how things are. Let’s say we saw a person in Phoenix speeding at 60 miles an hour on a 45 mile-per-hour [street], and then imagine that we saw a very tight intersection in SF – can you realistically mix these two to challenge your driver to a harsher situation that may occur many millions of miles later in the real world?
[On top of that], being able to add rain, for example – all right, you’re safe enough when you’re driving through good weather, through this tight intersection with a speeding agent. Can you do that as well in rain? Can you do that at night? You can’t wait for the rain in real life to occur exactly when you want to push your system in that way, but being able to simulate rain requires that infrastructure but also enough algorithms and realism on top to be able to push this.
Can you get specific about how much compute that requires?
I have worked with pretty high-scale systems before Waymo, at Google and Ericsson, and this is a pretty staggering scale. But the only number I can tell you is 25,000-plus virtual vehicles driving continuously, 24/7, learning from each other, and [tens of] billions of miles in simulations. Think of how much you or I drive in a year – we drive, what, 10,000 miles in any given year…? Now think of billions of miles of experience – close to seven orders of magnitude difference.
Let’s talk about the shift in ridership over the past month. Have you seen an increase? Decrease?
Things are growing – to give you an idea, this year we have more than 10x’d [trips with public riders]… The ridership is increasing in both Phoenix and SF. We are well ahead of 10,000 trips [in each city] every single week… So it’s going well. We’re taking the time to respond to feedback and thoughtfully expand.
[Note: Waymo recently shared that Waymo riders took more than 700,000 trips in autonomous vehicles in 2023.]
Amid all the controversies, in recent months, what’s been the impact on public perception of your programs?
For riders, it’s just been an incredibly positive response. We look at their ratings, we look at their usage patterns, we look at what they qualitatively tell us, we speak to them in focus groups and all of them have been overwhelmingly positive…
On people we share the city with – communities, groups, like first responders, firefighters and so on – we’re continuously engaged with them. We’re listening to their feedback. We have trained more than 5,000 first responders in SF alone, multiple training sessions, and based on that have [brought] new features. For example, now we can signal intensities to firefighters that, “Hey, we’re about to make a U-turn and get out of this scene.”
Over the same period, have regulators’ demands of the Waymo team changed at all?
With regulators, we have a very open dialogue and submitted more data than they ever asked for… So it has been a very positive engagement with them, but no change in tone.
We were the first company that openly released our safety framework, the mechanism by which we test the performance of our system and how we determine when we’re ready to deploy, three years ago. We were also the first to release all of our collision data from the fully autonomous service… Those were all before any regulator asked us for something. And then yes, we do submit ongoing reports to them as well.
As far as your AI processes and how exactly things work – are you running deep learning on neural networks? Feeding in training data from simulations? Give me a rundown.
There’s a ton of AI that’s helping us detect a pedestrian, a child, a cyclist, a pedestrian on a scooter, a pedestrian on a scooter that’s motorized which is why it’s going much faster, an older person with a stroller they’re pushing. Being able to predict which direction the car that’s making an unusual curvature is going to jump in… being able to predict where different objects are going to be in the next few seconds.
All that is an insane amount of AI with a lot of specialization on the difference between how kids behave, versus how adults behave, versus how people on bicycles behave… Everything you can think of from deep learning, reinforcement learning, all of these areas, we are utilizing it in multiple parts of the system.
Most autonomous vehicles have remote operations teams. How does Waymo’s work?
I want to clarify that the driving is done by the Waymo Driver on the car – there is no remote person driving the car. You can think of it like air traffic control, in a way. Air traffic control doesn’t fly the plane, but the pilot may ask a question to air traffic control, “Hey, I’m observing a very anomalous situation here, what is the intent?” And there are very basic binary questions that can be asked that a person can respond to provide clarification when that’s not immediately clear from the scene.
For example, you could have a set of cones blocking a street, but there could be a large enough gap where you could go in, so it’s a bit ambiguous on whether or not you should go in or stop – that kind of a question can be asked and there’s an answer… And it’s designed to do the right thing even when support isn’t available.
What’s been Waymo’s biggest internal obstacle over the past year?
One thing I’ll say is definitely what has been interesting this year is bringing the cost down.
During past expansions, my impression has been that Waymo was looking for “Goldilocks cities,” and what I mean by that is cities that didn’t make it too difficult to roll out a driverless car service but were also challenging to some extent, such as a growing population or interesting road maneuvers but no snow or ice. When you’re on the lookout for your next city, what are you looking for – and what those cities might be beyond Phoenix?
You touched upon a key thing there. Phoenix has been amazing for us… If it’s really tight, you don’t need to see that far ahead, but when you are going at 45 and sometimes people are driving 50 to 60 miles per hour, you do need to see a lot further, anticipate objects, make unpredicted turns and so on. And what we found is when we went from Phoenix to San Francisco – the ultra high density of pedestrian narrow streets, double-parked cars, and so on – one thing we’re realizing is that every other good weather city in the United States, at least, and some internationally as well, is just a linear combination of the two. So if you take LA, for example, West Hollywood is a bit like the dense parts of San Francisco, but its paths to the suburbs are very much like Phoenix.
On the axis of weather, we’re now doing rain and fog… and then the next, eventually, will be snow… What we’re trying to make sure of is that we don’t go to a city just to rubber-stamp it, just to be able to say that we’re autonomous there.
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.
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.
‘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.”
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.”
“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.