@Jacobkupp i find it funny that people say songs like TV Guide are "too preachy". maybe i'm desensitized from listening to too much lupe fiasco as a child but, let a guy express himself! that's what he's here for!
@Pontifex mr pope sir have you read Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences by Bowker and Starr if not I think you would enjoy it let me know sincerely alex
the midwest... it calls to me. i drive past in and out but I can only think of culvers. when night falls i think i can hear midwest emo guitar riffs. i am haunted by dreams in which i am attending a umich football game and yelling go blue
first visit to chicago review:
midwesterners are gluttonous beasts. i finally understand what the world sees when they talk about fat americans. you put cake slices into milkshakes. your regional sport is played seated, from a car. the italian beef is a monstrosity. i love you.
i have no doubt that scott wu is very smart but he absolutely did not beat mango at melee with "faster hands and superior poker-like bluff actions". it's such a absurd and silly "my uncle beat lebron james in basketball"-tier lie that it makes every other claim less credible
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.
never been cited by anybody for anything before, and i'm a little surprised by my reaction. i just really didn't expect to feel so delighted that somebody read something "academic" that I put so much effort into. maybe an experience that most people have earlier in their life?
Hi #chi2022 ! I'm a master's student at UC Berkeley and this is my first conference. I'll be presenting a LBW with @leafjooce @juliaxwang Clarissa Wu on edible data, subjectivity in human-ML interactions, and assisted introspection/reflection. Let's hang out! Pics and more below: