Cognition founder: Almost all top AI entrepreneurs come from the competitive programming community; entrepreneurship is becoming like "mathematical poker."

According to Beating's monitoring, Colossus magazine published a three-hour interview with Scott Wu, founder of Cognition. In the interview, the reporter asked Wu a very interesting question: Why are almost all the leading figures in the AI industry from the competitive programming world? The reporter compared this to the "Budapest Martians" of the early 20th century: John von Neumann, Szilard, and Taylor—a group of Hungarian Jewish geniuses who later rewrote physics—were born in roughly the same era, attended roughly the same schools, participated in roughly the same math competitions, and finally met in Los Alamos to build the atomic bomb. This analogy is not an exaggeration when applied to today's AI community. Among Wu's IOI teammates, Alexandr Wang founded Scale AI, Johnny Ho co-founded Perplexity, Jesse Zhang founded Decagon, and Jeffrey Yan founded Hyperliquid. Looking further afield: OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman was among the top 24 in the US Mathematics Olympiad and a silver medalist in the Chemistry Olympiad; OpenAI research lead Mark Chen co-led the US IOI national team with Wu; OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki is a long-time rival of Wu's, having faced him many times in international competitions; and Anthropic founder Dario Amodei was a member of the US Physics Olympiad national team. Wu's explanation is simple: competitions filter out two things: intelligence and a relentless drive. He used the word "salty," saying that he's always wanted to beat everyone, even those several years older than him. Those with enough intelligence and a relentless drive, after a few years of hard work, will eventually develop product sense, leadership skills, and business acumen. As for why everyone jumped into the business around the same time, Wu says the biggest contributor was Alexandr Wang. The two became best friends on Google Hangouts in high school and even co-wrote a startup idea document. Wang was the first in the industry to actually start a business, and others followed suit when they saw him do it. Wu said, "Many people don't even realize that entrepreneurship is an option. We're lucky to have gone through all this together and watched each other grow." He also used an analogy: entrepreneurship is becoming like poker. In the early days, poker masters relied on intuition and experience, but now the tables are full of math whizzes. AI startups have reached this point as well; founders with strong technical backgrounds are more successful than those who tell stories, because the core challenge is tackling hard technical problems.