- A 2010 clip of Cognition CEO Scott Wu seemingly winning a math competition is circulating.
- The video resurfaced days after Cognition introduced “the first artificial intelligence software engineer,” dubbed Devin.
- “What the hell! I couldn’t even read it that fast,” one child viewer said in the video.
On Tuesday, Scott Wu’s startup Cognition launched what it claims is the world’s “first artificial intelligence software engineer,” Devin, creating quite a buzz — and a little discomfort — in the tech community. A 2010 video of a kid many say is Wu seemingly killing him during a math competition brought the CEO even more attention.
In short video shared widely on Reddit and Xex-Twitter, a young Wu appears to be playing with another child during the 2010 Raytheon Mathcounts National Competition for sixth through eighth graders.
When asked which “letter was in the 2010 position” in a particular pattern, the boy, identified by many as Wu, immediately pressed a button and answered “A,” which the moderator said was correct.
He later answered questions before the moderator finished them. When the presenter asked the contestants to calculate the equation, the young man interrupted him in the middle of the question to say the correct answer. He similarly answered the following question about the number of integers in the given sequence.
“The sheer speed here is really impressive,” a person on Reddit wrote in a thread about the video. “He’s not just fast, he’s incredibly fast.”
“What the hell! I couldn’t even read it that fast,” another Redditor wrote about the questions the child was asked.
The video resurfaced just days after now-CEO Wu introduced Devin. The autonomous AI developer, Cognition claims, is the first of its kind to write code, fix bugs and train AI models, among other tasks, all by itself.
Wu did not respond to Business Insider when asked to confirm whether he is a child and, if so, how old he is.
Regardless, Wu has a history of mathematical prowess. He studied economics at Harvard University, then later worked as a software engineer at Addepar, which makes wealth management software, before co-founding and running Lunchclub, a social platform powered by artificial intelligence, as CTO for five years, according to LinkedIn.
More than a year later, Wu launched Cognition, which raised $21 million from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Bloomberg reported. Scott works alongside his brother Neal, and the two are globally acclaimed for their coding skills, according to Bloomberg.
Today we are excited to introduce Devin, the first artificial intelligence software engineer.
Devin is a new top achiever on the SWE-Bench coding benchmark, has successfully completed hands-on engineering interviews with leading AI companies, and has even completed real jobs on Upwork.
Devin is… pic.twitter.com/ladBicxEat
— Cognition (@cognition_labs) March 12, 2024
Cognition claims that Devin can radically change the way software engineers do their jobs.
“Devin is a tireless, skilled teammate, equally willing to build alongside you or independently complete the tasks you review,” Cognition wrote in a blog post. “With Devin, engineers can focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can pursue more ambitious goals.”
That vision has sparked conversation among some software engineers who seem concerned that it could put their jobs at risk.
“We could be trying to cure cancer or make tax preparation 100% free, but instead, we’re trying to aggressively replace one of the few remaining jobs that provide a legitimate middle-class income,” Kyle Shevlin, founder and software engineer at software development agency Athagist, wrote on X.
And reactions to Devin’s capabilities — which Cognition claims can solve 13.86% of coding problems found in open source projects on GitHub — seem mixed.
Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas said the autonomous AI coder appears to be “crossing the threshold” of human capabilities. However, Evan You, a developer based in Singapore, said the AI was “quite unsatisfactory” and added that a programmer who completes tasks only 13% of the time is a “liability” instead of an “item”.
But Wu’s cognitive speed — then and now — seems to have continued to amaze tech fans, s one X user who said they spoke to him at the Lunchclub saying, “While I was speaking or after I would ask a question, I would see that Scott was thinking in teraflops per second. Bro is built differently.” Teraflops is a term for extremely high computing speed. “That day actually scared me because I found out that some people just do different sizes.”
And if the video is about Wu, he’s not the only one who’s a real mathematician: Cognition’s team won 10 gold medals at the infamously difficult International Olympiad in Computer Science, according to the company’s website.