flâneur

Monica L

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on the atlas — 37

highlights — 151

  • But the world where I actually couldn’t live with myself is the one where I took this thing that was a perfect match for everything I’ve always naturally loved and cared about, and been fortunate to have some aptitude for, and just didn’t give it my all. It’s the outcome where I didn’t try hard enough, or didn’t have enough motivation to do it, where I don’t think I could live with myself anymore.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • We’ve always thought of it as its own being that can go and do stuff. As things have continued, I’d say that’s more and more been the case for us. Two years ago it was kind of an aspiration; day-to-day you obviously still needed to do a lot of handholding with Devin. We’re honestly now at the point where you really can just work with it as a coworker. One concrete example would be that at this point, a decent fraction of all of our Devin sessions—or all of the Devin sessions that our customers run—are not run by humans anymore. They’re run automatically.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • it would go do its own work, it would work in all the same systems, it would be with you in Slack, with you in Jira or whatever, and just work with you.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • In order to do some of these really hard problems, you need to develop a lot of fundamental logical reasoning, a lot of creativity, and the ability to string together very, very long chains of reasoning and make sure they all line up. Knowing that models can do this with sufficient reinforcement learning and the right training data does suggest, pretty clearly, that a lot of these practical tasks can be done.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • But it was also an interesting time to think about what I valued, what I cared about. What I wanted to be my life’s work.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • In that way, COVID was honestly… For me and my brother it was a big blessing, because it was a chance to just spend time with our parents during that period.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • I was an Econ major, which is kind of hilarious. I kind of knew I wasn’t going to graduate. I took writing classes, public speaking classes, philosophy classes, one CS class. But I didn’t really care about the school part of it. Harvard would always do this reading week before finals, like a week where everybody would be finishing their essays and studying. I just didn’t care at all. My entire week was just hanging out with different people. Many of them were studying the whole week and didn’t see other people. For a lot of them I was their only break from studying.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • If you’re smart enough to always analyze and adjust and think about what you did wrong and do it better next time, and you’re motivated enough to just do that nonstop, day in and out for several years, I think usually you can get pretty good at any of these other downstream things.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • I guess my take on this is that the two qualities that really matter in our fields are intelligence and hunger.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • You have to be able to attract other very smart people. On a stage full of Muppets, you have to clearly be the main Muppet. In group pictures you have to seem to be lit differently. You have to have product intuition and people skills.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • Alexandr and I had this doc in middle school that I still remember of startup ideas. I’m sure all the ideas were really bad, but we were already thinking we should start a company at some point.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • But now I think AI in particular, and to some extent crypto as well, has really led to this very technical profile. Of all the big companies people talk about in AI, so many are run by people from a fairly similar community. OpenAI comes to mind. Greg Brockman, for example, was older than me, but he did all the same competitions. He was top 24 in the U.S. in math. He was on the U.S. Chemistry team, he got a silver at the Chemistry Olympiad. Mark Chen, who runs the research team at OpenAI, we coached the IOI U.S. team together. Jakub [Pachoki], who’s their chief scientist, I used to compete aga…
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • 70s, ’80s, and ’90s, you had all these very raw figures, kind of the Hollywood trope of the troubled past. They played with very deep intuition for the game. They definitely thought about it analytically, but they wouldn’t be out there nerding out about probabilities. But over time, a lot of what poker evolved into is actually just that: It’s a lot of math, and a lot of the best poker players now are very much math nerds. The same was true with chess, and the same is true with a lot of these games.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • all of whom are Chinese-American and born around the turn of the millennium.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • I realized that because I wanted to work in the Bay, and I basically figured out what I had to do to get a diploma. And I did that.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • rogramming obviously is just that it’s so nicely practical. I remember training for the MathCounts national competition and making myself a program that would feed me different mental math problems. I would play my own game that I created and use that to train. Realizing you could actually go and build things, that was very satisfying.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • “I’m sorry, I don’t know what these terms mean. But you’re just talking about the part where you do this and then that, right?” I guess I’ve always just thought of things in somewhat more intuitive terms. I think it is a bit unusual.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • Funnily enough, one of the things that’s been fairly consistent for me is I’ve never learned the names of any of these things. I’ve just always thought about it at an intuitive level—like, when this is true, then therefore it has to be that. I often don’t know what something’s called or what theorem it is. It just feels like one case of a broader, universal truth.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • I loved the programming competitions more for a few reasons. The actual topics were much more up my alley. In math, I was very good at probability, combinatorics, counting problems, basically a lot of the same things as strategy games: computing the different options, understanding what leads to what. Versus something like geometry, which I was fine at but didn’t enjoy as much. Programming is much more like combinatorics in all of the problems.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • That’s how I met Jesse Zhang, Johnny Ho, Jeffrey Yan from Hyperliquid, Alexandr Wang from Scale. Jeff was one of my best friends in high school and college. Alexandr was like my best friend from middle school. He was from New Mexico, we were kind of similar in that way.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • So I went to nationals and met a lot of the other kids there, and we’d keep in touch over Google Hangouts. That continued on in high school. There were summer camps for top students in math and programming. All of those folks were a lot of my closest friends. I started Cognition with many of them.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • The same competition, I went back in third grade, at which point I was taking Algebra 1. I competed in the ninth-grade division and I think I got a perfect score and got first place. From a very young age I always wanted to beat everybody.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • At the award ceremony they were calling out the names, and I was expecting to hear my name at some point. And then it didn’t come
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • I was so salty. I was just… man. I still remember this. I was just so, so, so salty. That was one of my earliest memories.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • The best competitive programmer ever is Gennady Korotkevich, who works here [at Cognition] now.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • y parents and my brother were all like 99th percentile competitive. Maybe my mom was the most of us, actually, if I had to guess.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • She always strongly instilled in me that you have the potential to be the best. It was never like, “All these other people are so amazing and you should be learning from them.” It was more like, “You can do any of the things they do.”
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • I’ve always just really liked logic and the ability to draw things out to their natural conclusions. The cool thing with math is that if you really deeply understand all these things, it all just makes logical sense. It also didn’t hurt that I was pretty good at it and therefore could beat people, and I obviously love beating people.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • My parents definitely pushed me a decent bit to study and practice, but pretty quickly I was at the point where I just wanted to. I was fully self-propelled. It’s very hard to do if you’re not deeply interested in it. I had always loved math because it’s just so elegant. But it was helpful to have the push from my parents.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • My brother taught me programming when I think I was in fourth grade. I played Pokémon on my computer on an emulator all the time, which is how I learned to program more. I played Tetris. There’s this card game called 24. Various little games like that where it’s just logic or puzzles or strategy and you can calculate options. Those were always my biggest hobbies.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • grown up instead with a lot of kids from around the country and around the world who did these math and programming competitions, because they were by far much more similar to me.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • I was bullied a lot. I was just very different. I was quite a loner up until the point when I started meeting people similar to me in competitions.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • It helped that my brother was four years older than me. We had a lot of the same interests and I really looked up to him, because there were not a lot of other people like us in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • I have one older brother, Neal, who’s four years older than me. I was born in 1996
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • My dad was a very avid Go player, and he had a professor he played Go with.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • They both studied chemical engineering at Colorado State.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • My parents were both from Shanghai, they grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • Since they hadn’t really gone to school, my mom was working in a textile factory at the time. They worked and studied for the exam in the evenings and eventually went to university. They both did very well as students.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • Devin is now the agent of choice for enterprises from the U.S. Army to Goldman Sachs and Mercedes-Benz. Cognition, whose customer base a year and a half ago was zero, is raising at a valuation around $25 billion.
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • First, Wu predicted earlier than most that the AI industry would converge on agents that run in the background 24/7, taking handed-off tasks like coworkers rather than autocomplete tools. Second, he saw that GPT-4-era models were already capable enough to start building those agents when the consensus was that they were still several years away. Third, when others were dubious, he believed that product-market fit for AI agents was a non-question, considering the world already spends trillions of dollars a year on “meat computers” (human software engineers). Last, he was willing to ship early a…
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
  • Cognition is also one of the fastest-growing businesses in the history of business, doubling usage of Devin every eight weeks and hitting $445 million of revenue run rate in its first 18 months of service
    The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
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