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Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Techmeme write 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 missed today in the world of tech look, sometimes the roulette wheel of headlines piles things on top of each other, and today is one of those days. I should start by acknowledging the fact that of course my first ever company was resumewriters.com but forgive me, we're going to talk about AI and resumes and hiring the top story on Techmeme 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 inter viewing tools to assess responses and rank candidates. Basically having to deal with the deluge of applications. Quite 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. ChatGPT, 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 Lee, 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 Avocado has reduced hiring time by 75%. HireVue, 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, HireVue 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 spend all this time creating very catered cover letters, very catered resumes, she said. Jeremy Schiffling, a career coach who regularly conducts technology focused job search training at universities, 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 endgame 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. 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, Career Builder Plus Monster, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is agreeing to sell its job board to Job get 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 US 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 CareerBuilder, said on Tuesday. Jobget, Valnet and Valsoft will serve as stalking horse or lead bidders in a court supervised sale process subject to higher and better offers. CareerBuilder says it plans to pay its vendors in its US businesses in full. In the normal course during its bankruptcy proceedings last year, Randstad nv, the world's largest employment agency, formed a joint venture between its monster job board business and Apollo Portfolio Company CareerBuilder. End quote. There was a time around the great financial crisis where ResumeWriters.com was the company that powered Career Builder's resume service. Bit of personal history there, but the pile on 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 Metaview'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 Funne. Also AI Answers, an 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. Medivue says its customers, which include Sony, Brex, Elevenlabs and Deliveroo, save 30 minutes after every job interview and up to 2 hours per job post. While other companies offer similar note taking services, Magus sees Metaview as protected from threats from general purpose tools like Microsoft Copilot through its specialization in recruitment workflows, Metaview 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 Metaview's AI tools to generate far more accurate and relevant summaries. And finally, another one, another pylon Paraform, which operates a hiring marketplace with AI powered candidate relationship management and other tools, raised a $20 million Series A led by Felicis Ventures. A US judge ruled yesterday that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train their AI models was fair use, but Anthropic storage of pirated books in a central library used 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 Alsat 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 Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who sued Anthropic last year over claims the company trained its family of Claude 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 address Anthropics moved 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. Author's complaint is no different than it would be if they complained that training schoolchildren to write well would result in explosion of competing works, judge Alsop writes, adding that the Copyright act seeks to advance original work works of authorship, not to protect authors against competition. Despite these wins for Anthropic, Judge Alsop writes that Anthropic's 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 accessed lawfully was itself reasonably necessary to any subsequent fair use, Alsop 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, anthropic's 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 when you're starting off with something new, it seems like your to do list keeps growing every day with new tasks, and that list can easily begin to overrun your life. Finding the right tool that not only helps you out but simplifies everything can be such a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to my own resumewriters.com get started with your own design design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style, accelerate your content creation. Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling shopify.com ride go to shopify.com ride shopify.com ride while single AI agents can handle specific tasks, the real power comes when specialized agents collaborate to solve complex problems. Although there is a fundamental gap, we have no standardized infrastructure for these agents to discover, communicate with, and work alongside each other. Well, that's where Agency Agency Gntcy comes in. The Agency is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents, a global collaboration layer where AI agents can work together. It will connect systems across vendors and frameworks, solving the biggest problems of discovery, interoperability and scalability for enterprises. With contributors like Cisco, Crewai, LangChain and mongodb, Agency is breaking down silos and building the future of interoperable AI. Shape the future of enterprise innovation. Visit agency.org to explore use cases now that's a G N T C Y.org Google has launched Gemini Cli, an agentic AI tool that lets developers make natural language requests in terminals by connecting Gemini models to local code bases. Quoting TechCrunch, Gemini CLI 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, Jules. However, Gemini CLI competes directly with other command line AI tools such as OpenAI's Codecs CLI and Anthropic's Claude 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 popular popularity of Gemini 2.5 Pro has driven usage of third party AI coding tools such as Cursor and GitHub Copilot, 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 VO3 model, generate research reports with the company's Deep Research agent, or access real time information through Google Search. Google also says Gemini CLI can connect to MCP servers, allowing developers to connect to external databases. To encourage adoption, Google is also open sourcing Gemini CLI 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 1,000 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 $0.04 per image or $0.06 per image for the Ultra model that precisely follows instructions. Back to this idea of AI becoming an arms race where 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 2000, 232 teachers polled at US K12 public schools say they used AI tools in the 20242025 school year. Regulars estimate weekly time savings by using these tools at 5.9 hours. Putting the AP for her 6th grade honors class math teacher Anna Sepulveda wanted to make geometry fun. She figured her students who live and breathe soccer would be to learn how mathematical concepts apply to the Sport. She asked ChatGPT 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 ChatGPT 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 chatbots 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 eight in 10 teachers teachers who use AI tools say it saves them time on work tasks like making worksheets, assessments, quizzes or on administrative work. About 6 in 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 of iPhone parts used to film inside of the cars to the AirPods Max that Pitt's character F1 driver Sonny 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 one Reddit user. UCaptain42d 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 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 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 the 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 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 Starrett Lehigh building on the far west side of Chelsea. That was one of the big buildings for dotcom startups back in those days. I think a third of the tenants at that were.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.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.