Before you have any questions, it’s worth noting that Scott Wu, the brilliance behind Devin – touted as the most capable autonomous coding agent – is a human. The demo video of Devin, released by Cognition Labs, introduces Wu as a ‘Human Software Engineer’, prompting viewers to ponder if he truly is human, especially after watching the childhood videos of him acing math quizzes.
“I first learned to program when I was nine years old and fell in love with the ability to turn my ideas into reality. Teaching AI to code at Cognition Labs has been a dream come true,” said Wu on X, while announcing Devin.
Source: X
Wu, along with its two co-founders Steven Hao, the CTO, and Walden Yan, the chief product officer, founded Cognition in November 2023. The startup calls itself an ‘AI lab focused on reasoning’, and claims that ‘code is just the beginning’.
Child Prodigy
Wu, 27, studied economics at Harvard University, after which he moved to San Francisco to start his own company. However, the story of his rare brilliance began when he was a little child.
As a child, Wu participated in many math competitions, and aced them all with ease. Post the Devin announcement, various people shared their experience of having witnessed Wu as a child math whizz and programming genius.
Source: X
As a competitive programmer, Wu has been winning competitions on the programming platform Codeforces for years. As participants, one can compete in various coding contests, solving algorithmic problems and improving their programming skills on Codeforce.
Wu has gained the title of a ‘legendary grandmaster’ on the platform.
Source: Codeforces
Prior to founding Cognition AI, Wu built another company called Lunchclub, which was backed by Lightspeed, Coatue and a16z. Wu served as its CTO and co-founder. Lunchclub is an AI superconnector that facilitates introductions for 1:1 video meetings.
Building Team with Coding Champions
While Wu’s genius sounds unparalleled, his brother is not far behind. Scott Wu’s older brother Neal Wu, who is also building Cognition Labs, has been participating with Scott in coding competitions since they were teenagers.
The brothers are also math legends winning nationals several times during their school. A partner at Founders Fund, Delian, enthusiastically posted that he witnessed the brothers win nationals when he was in middle school, and said that he was excited about the model.
Neal has worked in a number of big-tech companies including Facebook and Google Brain. He has also worked as a head teaching fellow at Harvard University.
Cognition AI received $21 million from Peter Thiel’s VC firm, Founders Fund. The small founding team boasts 10 IOI gold medals, which is the ‘International Olympiad in Informatics’, a prestigious competitive programming competition for secondary schools students.
The highly-talented team members have previously worked with Google DeepMind, Cursor, ScaleAI, and other tech companies.
The Cognition Labs team, with Scott Wu (back row, 3rd from right) and brother Neal Wu (front row, 2nd from left). Source: Bloomberg
Scott believes that the proficient background of his team gives the startup an edge over its competitors. “It’s almost like this game that we’ve all been playing in our minds for years, and now there’s this chance to code it into an AI system,” he said.
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