Ted Kang

hi, my name is ted.

[Colossus @colossusmag]

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.

[Kevin Kiley @KevinKileyCA]

A new report titled “California’s Economic Performance Review 2025” paints an absolutely damning picture of our state’s decline during Newsom’s governorship:

-Highest unemployment rate in the nation at 5.5%, with over 1 million unemployed workers

-181,700 private sector jobs lost in 2025 and 432,900 private jobs lost the last three years, with almost all new job growth coming from government

-1.9 unemployed workers per job opening, the worst ratio in the country, with layoffs and separations up by 57% in 2025

-Net business establishments in 2025 down almost 90 percent since before Newsom took office, with almost all new firms being sole proprietorships with no employees

-highest cost of living of any state, with 6 of the 10 most expensive metropolitan areas in the country

-Electricity rates nearly double the rest of the country for homes and almost triple for industry, along with highest in the nation gas prices

-Highest poverty rate in the nation at 16.4%

-1.9 million residents lost to other states the last seven years, including 409,000 workers lost in job-to-job migration over five years

-Budget growth of 68.2% since 2019, with a structural deficit that is now $20–35 billion annually

-Nearly a 50 percent drop in the number of high earners filing tax returns over $10 million the last five years

[meatball times @meatballtimes]

after spending a year as a teacher, I am now convinced that the last ~50 years of education research was flat out wrong. like, "sun revolves around the earth" levels of wrong.

time to drop the epicycles and return to empiricism in education

[All day Astronomy @forallcurious]

JUST IN🚨: In Osaka’s Umeda area, a pipe about 30 meters long and 5 meters in diameter suddenly emerged from underground overnight. It has now risen to around 10 meters, and the cause remains unknown.

[skepticalifornia @skepticaliblog]

“Since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger left office in 2011, California’s budget has grown two and a half times to almost $300 billion

... The sorry truth is that the extra tax revenue has flowed largely to government employees in the form of lavish compensation packages.”

[Retro Anime @retro_anime]

Happy Pokémon Day!

[_DavidMorrell @_DavidMorrell]

My dear friend & incomparable author Dan Simmons died Saturday from a stroke at age 77. He defied literary norms, exploring historical fiction, horror, crime & other genres. His must-read titles include THE SONG OF KALI & HYPERION. He was one of a kind.
https://t.co/NcBFT4hBc6

[SciFi Art @retroscifiart]

RIP Dan Simmons (April 4, 1948 – February 21, 2026). Author of one of the greatest science fiction book series ever, the Hyperion Cantos. Thanks for firing my imagination 📚

[HIDEO_KOJIMA @HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN]

R.I.P.

[Jon Del Arroz | Pop Culture & Gaming 🎮 @jondelarroz]

Legendary sci-fi writer Dan Simmons has passed away of a stroke.

Hyperion is one of science fiction's greatest literary works. He was amazing and inspirational, and he kept out of the public eye in recent years after the left went after him for questioning climate change.

He will be missed.

[litquidity @litcapital]

We need a ‘Silicon Valley’ reboot ASAP. This is absolute cinema

[terminally onλine εngineer @tekbog]

korean autism remains a sight to behold

[Today In History @historigins]

2014 might have been the greatest year of TV shows in history

[Bill Simmons @BillSimmons]

Thanks to the LA Times for continuing to report on everyone who (a) caused the LA fires thru sheer incompetence/stupidity, (b) had no real plan for stopping the fires, and/or (c) tried to cover up their own mistakes/liability afterwards. What a disgrace.

https://t.co/Rl1Yj6s6Iu

[Daniel Yang @punished_daniel]

The problem with "finding your passion" is that it turns out most Asian guys wants to play league of legends for 20 hours a day, every day, for at least 15 years

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

You literally can’t make this up

Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia is who just uncovered that $27 million dollar NGO homeless fraud that led to an arrest

Now, ‘executives from the real estate and private equity industry, and at least 10 billionaires are pouring money into the LA City Controller race to remove him’

Again, you literally can’t make this up…

[Marc Joffe @marcjoffe]

27 Oakland police officers made $200.000+ in overtime in 2024. One cop billed the department for 3304 OT hours and was paid a total of $711k.

No wonder Oakland has budget problems. https://t.co/dtVUCx8P3d

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

“At Stanford, almost no one talks about the system with shame. Rather, we openly discuss, strategise and even joke about it. At a university of savvy optimisers, the feeling is that if you aren’t getting accommodations, you haven’t tried hard enough.”