A clip seemingly of the CEO behind AI engineer Devin is going viral
On Tuesday, Scott Wu's startup Cognition launched what it claims to be the world's "first AI software engineer," Devin, creating quite the buzz — and a little discomfort — in the tech community. A clip from 2010 of a kid that many say is Wu, seemingly killing it during a math competition, has got the CEO even more attention.
In the short video widely shared on Reddit and X, formerly Twitter, a young Wu appears to be duking it out with another kid during the 2010 Raytheon Mathcounts National Competition for students grades six to eight.
When asked what the "letter in the 2010th position" is in a particular pattern, the kid who many identify as Wu appeared to hit the button immediately and answered "A," which the moderator said was correct.
He later answered questions before the moderator could finish asking them. When the host asked the contestants to calculate an equation, the youngster interrupted him mid-question to say the right answer. He answered a subsequent question about the number of integers in a given sequence similarly.
"It's the sheer speed that's truly impressive here," a person on Reddit wrote in a thread about the video. "He's not just fast, he's incredibly fast."
"What the heck! I couldn't even read it that fast," another Redditor wrote regarding the questions the child was asked.
The video resurfaced just days after now-CEO Wu unveiled 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 on its own.
Related stories
Wu didn't respond to Business Insider when asked to confirm if he was the child and, if so, how old he was.
Regardless, Wu has a history of math prowess. He studied economics at Harvard University, then later worked as a software engineer at Addepar, which makes wealth management software, before he co-founded and led Lunchclub, an AI-powered social platform, as CTO for five years, according to LinkedIn.
Over a year later, Wu moved on to start Cognition, which raised $21 million in funding from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Bloomberg reported. Scott works alongside his brother Neal, and the two are feted globally for their coding prowess, according to Bloomberg.
Today we're excited to introduce Devin, the first AI software engineer.
Devin is the new state-of-the-art on the SWE-Bench coding benchmark, has successfully passed practical engineering interviews from leading AI companies, and has even completed real jobs on Upwork.
Devin is… pic.twitter.com/ladBicxEat
Cognition claims that Devin can radically change how software engineers do their jobs.
"Devin is a tireless, skilled teammate, equally ready to build alongside you or independently complete tasks for you to review," Cognition wrote in a blog post. "With Devin, engineers can focus on more interesting problems, and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals."
That vision has sparked conversation among some software engineers who seem worried that it may potentially put their jobs at risk.
"We could be trying to cure cancers or make tax prep 100% free, but instead, we're trying to aggressively replace one of the few remaining jobs that provides a legit middle-class income," Kyle Shevlin, founder and software engineer at software development agency Athagist, wrote on X.
And reactions to the capabilities of Devin — which Cognition claims can resolve 13.86% of coding issues found in open-source projects on GitHub — seem mixed.
Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas said the autonomous AI coder appears to "cross the threshold" of human capability. However, Evan You, a Singapore-based developer, said the AI is "quite underwhelming" and added that a developer that accomplishes tasks only 13% of the time is a "liability" instead of an "asset."
But Wu's cognitive speed — then and now — seems to have continued to wow tech fans, with one X user who said they'd interviewed with him at Lunchclub saying, "As I was speaking or after I'd ask a question, I'd see Scott think at teraflops a second. Bro was built different." A teraflop is a term for an extremely fast computing speed. "That day actually scared me as I found out that some people just work off a different magnitude."
And if the video is of Wu, he isn't alone in being quite the mathlete: Cognition's team has won 10 gold medals at the infamously difficult International Olympiad in Informatics, according to the company's website.
