thank you @colossusmag and thank you to @JeremySternLA for coming to visit the Cog office!
to give my side of what seems to be the most controversial story of the article: I went to a Founders Fund game night and Mango showed up because Brian from FF is also on the board of Cloud9. I have played a lot of melee (probably my most played game after, like, competitive programming) so was pretty excited to get to play him.
the setup was mega laggy but we played for a while. I took one game (he played falcon and wasn't trying that hard). would not use the phrase "beat him to a pulp," i'd obviously get washed in a real tournament set lol.
not sure how Jeremy even heard this story but seems his sources run deep :)
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Scott Wu is the co-founder of Cognition AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in history. He’s also the greatest competitive programmer the US has ever produced. You may have seen him doing impossible card tricks and mental math.
You’ve never seen him asked about weed, Michael Jordan, cancer, and human consciousness over a punnet of strawberries. That is what Colossus editor-in-chief Jeremy Stern did on a recent visit to San Francisco.
For those less familiar with @ScottWu46: In 2nd grade, he entered a math competition for 7th graders, lost, and was so furious he still fumes about it 20 years later. The next year he entered the 9th-grade division as a 3rd-grader and got a perfect score.
Then he won first place at the US national middle-school math competition and three straight gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, where he became the greatest American gold-medalist and coach in history.
Most of the people running the biggest AI companies met as teenagers, competing for their countries on international math and science teams. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Alexandr Wang, to name just a few.
Most agree that the von Neumann among them was Scott Wu.
In November 2023, a few weeks after his mother died of lung cancer, on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, Wu founded his own AI company: Cognition.
He was 26 and saw earlier than almost anyone that AI would converge on agents that work in the background, 24/7, like coworkers. He shipped Cognition’s AI software engineer Devin in March 2024. It worked poorly, and he took intense public criticism for it.
Now, in its first 18 months of service, Devin has generated $445 million of revenue run rate and usage has doubled every eight weeks. The US Army, Goldman Sachs, and Mercedes-Benz are all customers. Cognition is raising at a valuation around $25 billion.
@JeremySternLA sat down with Wu, the emperor of the nerds, to ask the questions we’d all ask one of the smartest people in America—building the most consequential technology of our generation—if we ever got the chance.
As well as MJ and weed, they talk about the cluster of competitive math prodigies behind so much of AI, what makes us human when AGI arrives, and why Wu believes he was put on this earth to teach AI how to code.
Read the piece below.
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Intelligence at 1000 tokens per second, right in your terminal.
Now available with SWE-1.6 Fast, powered by @cerebras.
We're giving the first 100 people who respond a free month of Max to try it out.
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Katie has always had a unique way of seeing around corners - would highly recommend working with her! Congrats @katie_haun :)
honored to work with you, @imjaredz!
Huge update.. I joined @Cognition
I’m so incredibly proud of what we built at @PromptLayer. Although it feels a little surreal, I know the team is left in amazing hands. I’ll be staying on as an advisor and can’t wait to see where they take it.
We started PromptLayer four years ago, and we practically coined the term “prompt engineering”. ChatGPT had come out weeks prior. Nobody knew exactly how LLMs would evolve, but we did know it will completely change the way we build.
We were the first developer platform for this new type of builder.
Cognition feels like an extension of this vision. Devin is how this new builder will imagine, invent, and create. We're entering the age of software abundance, to steal a term from @scottwu46
Everything is Coding Agents. It’s the single biggest problem in AI. Cognition is one of the fastest growing companies ever.
But I think the team is what really sold it for me- it's packed with so many former founders
Excited to share more soon...
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or you can just use cloud agents ✨
we just dropped a huge @cognition x @MercedesBenz partnership so naturally i made both our teams a celebratory t-shirt
Katrin, Ola, and the whole @MercedesBenz team have been incredible partners already - excited to do much more together. Thanks for stopping by the office!
Cognition is partnering with @MercedesBenz to accelerate software engineering across their global engineering teams, representing one of the most extensive deployments of AI software engineering in the automotive industry to date.
@ScottWu46 sat down with Katrin Lehmann, Mercedes-Benz CIO, to discuss the work:
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GPT-5.5 is now available in Devin as an Agent Preview!
GPT-5.5 has set a new bar for what's possible with Devin. It runs longer and more autonomously than any GPT model we've tested, surfacing bugs no other model can catch, and investigating and fixing production issues end-to-end.
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Rivian and Volkswagen Group's joint venture put Devin to work on testing and ticket triage across a software platform that will power up to 30M vehicles.
Devin handles autonomous ticket triage in Slack and generates tests on safety-critical propulsion code 10-15x faster than manual authoring, freeing RV Tech's engineers to spend more time on new features.
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great deep dive from @walden_yan!
Found this photo from the internship :)
Very rewarding to see how people from childhood + college journey through life. Some of us have known each other since 6th grade.
@ScottWu46 @chameleon_jeff @alexandr_wang
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Craziest part is we all knew each other already in high school! Along with @randomjohnnyh (Perplexity cofounder), @demi_guo_ (Pika CEO), @stevenkplus1 and Andrew (Cognition), and many others. We all grew up in different states but met thru the olympiad scene.
Vividly remember this line from @alexandr_wang when we were around 19: "I hear people saying they want to find the next Paypal mafia. Why shouldn't it just be us?"
Glad to see @chameleon_jeff get the recognition he deserves :)
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HRT’s first ever intern class of 10 included:
• Jesse Zhang, cofounder/CEO of Decagon
• Alexandr Wang, cofounder/CEO of Scale AI
• Scott Wu, cofounder/CEO of Cognition
• Jeffrey Yan, founder/CEO of Hyperliquid
Insane!
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you can now get devin to fix issues flagged by greptile
with one click, launch a devin session that includes the issue and relevant context.
greptile and devin will loop until greptile gives the PR a 5/5
this has become the default way in which i use greptile
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Total amt of flops across all the GPUs in the world has grown about 3x per year for the last few years. Total amt of inference demand has probably grown ~10x per year. What happens when those lines cross?
The econ answer is: when demand > supply, price goes up. That might be true (even H100s are more expensive than they have ever been...) but doesn't actually solve the problem on its own here - demand continues to grow as we unlock new use cases and there is only so much additional supply coming.
To get to a healthy equilibrium, we also need to shift much more usage to smaller, targeted models. This will happen naturally as the incentives make sense for it: it's much easier to 10x your agent usage if you know that you can now solve 90% of your tasks with good cheap, fast models.
SWE 1.6 is not a general model. But we have trained it to specifically be good at the kinds of standard coding tasks that our users run. And thanks to its small size & a little magic from Cerebras it can run very cheaply at ~1000 tokens / sec. Give it a try and let us know what you think!
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We’re releasing SWE-1.6, our best model in both intelligence & model UX. SWE-1.6 matches our Preview model on SWE-Bench Pro while dramatically improving on various behavioral axes.
It’s available today in Windsurf in two modes: free tier (200 tok/s) and fast tier (950 tok/s).
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lucky to get to work with so many great ex-founders and so many great future-founders!
There's a reason @cognition keeps winning deals against companies 10x their size.
@vvkgopalan sat down with @theodormarcu, @bryceehunt and @moritz_stephan (all former founders!) to discuss hiring philosophy, infinity stories, enterprise coding agents, and what it actually takes to compete.
(00:00) Introduction
(03:45) Cognition team & hiring philosophy
(06:00) Infinity stories
(13:15) Product surface area and future goals
(17:20) Activation energy, experimentation, and customer-driven innovation
(19:00) Adoption, operational changes, and ownership
(22:05) Vibe coding hot takes
(24:15) AI-first engineering organizations and managing AI agents
(28:40) Future of software engineering roles and misconceptions about Devin
(30:00) Model development, learnings, and Cognition's journey in vertical integration
(38:10) What should you do as a new grad?
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Big news from me - I have officially joined the growth team @cognition!
This is the most talented group of people I’ve ever met, consistently building ahead of the curve. Devin is the frontier agent, and I use it every day.
We're hiring for all roles in growth - DMs open!
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Hanging with our new neighbors
@DevinAI + @BuildWithFlux = 🚀🚀🚀
