Author|Azuma(@azuma_eth)
Yesterday, a feature interview with Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan by "Colossos" magazine went viral across the internet (see "Jeff Yan's 'Hyper Life'").
In the interview, Jeff Yan revealed a little-known story — during his junior year at Harvard, he participated in the inaugural internship program of the quantitative trading giant "Hudson River Trading" (HRT). Ten interns were selected that year. Aside from Jeff Yan, who chose the cryptocurrency track, several others from the same intern cohort have now become prominent figures in the AI field, including Meta AI business line head Alexandr Wang, Decagon founder and CEO Jesse Zhang, and Cognition founder and CEO Scott Wu.
Odaily Note: A group photo of that year's interns shared by Jesse Zhang
According to additional disclosures by Scott Wu himself, the HRT internship program was not the starting point of their friendship. As early as high school, many of them had already met through Olympic competitions (Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and several others had won gold medals). That small circle included many more notable names, including but not limited to Perplexity co-founder and CSO Johnny Ho, Pika co-founder and CEO Demi Guo, and Steven Hao, Alexandr Wang's former partner in founding Scale AI......
During the formative years of Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and others, the "PayPal Mafia," represented by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, was already dominating the business world. People began searching for the next similar special network. Jeff Yan's small circle had also discussed this topic. The 19-year-old Alexandr Wang once said to his friends: "Why can't it be us?"
Ten years later, Alexandr Wang's bold statement seems to be coming true. Leveraging AI, this group of young people from the Hudson River are stirring up the era in their own way.
Alexandr Wang: Zuckerberg's AI Brain
Alexandr Wang is perhaps the most well-known figure in this small circle. Born in 1997 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Alexandr Wang is the descendant of Chinese immigrants. His parents were physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory — where the United States' first atomic bomb was secretly developed during World War II.
Alexandr Wang was passionate about mathematics and programming from a young age. He qualified for the Mathematical Olympiad Program in 2013, the USA Physics Team in 2014, and reached the finals of the USA Computing Olympiad in 2012 and 2013.
In 2015, Alexandr Wang dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded Scale AI a year later, which annotates data used for training AI in computer vision and audio transcription. Riding the wave of the AI boom, Scale AI's valuation soared, reaching $7.3 billion by 2021. Alexandr Wang, owning 15% of the shares, saw his net worth surpass $1 billion.
In June 2025, Meta, which had clearly fallen behind in the AI race, acquired 49% of Scale AI for $14.3 billion. Zuckerberg's附加条件 was that — the soul of Scale AI, the then 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, must join Meta. Alexandr Wang subsequently joined Meta and began leading Meta's AI development team, the "Meta Superintelligence Labs" (MSL).
On the night of April 8th, Zuckerberg's big gamble paid off. MSL officially released its first self-developed AI model, Muse Spark. Muse Spark is a native multimodal reasoning model supporting tool use, visual chain-of-thought, and multi-Agent orchestration. It is the most powerful model Meta has released to date. During training, MSL observed predictable scaling improvements in the model during pre-training, reinforcement learning, and test-time reasoning phases.
Scott Wu: Olympiad Prodigy, Creator of a $10 Billion AI Unicorn
Scott Wu was born in 1997 in Louisiana to a family of Chinese immigrants. Growing up, Scott Wu actively participated in programming and mathematics competitions, winning three gold medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics, including first place in 2014.
After high school, Scott Wu attended Harvard University but dropped out after two years. While an undergraduate at Harvard College, he was a team member in the 2016 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), where his team won a gold medal and placed third overall.
In 2019, Scott Wu co-founded the social platform Lunchclub as its CTO. In 2023, Scott Wu, along with friends Steven Hao and Walden Yan (both Olympic gold medalists), co-founded Cognition, where he serves as CEO.
In 2024, the Cognition team launched the world's first autonomous AI software engineer, Devin. This product can independently complete code writing, testing, and deployment, and supports the decomposition and collaboration of complex tasks. It significantly outperformed GPT-4 in the SWE-bench benchmark test. In May of the same year, Cognition raised $175 million in a round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, valuing the company at $2 billion post-money. In September 2025, Cognition raised another $400 million, skyrocketing its valuation to $10.2 billion.
By early 2026, Cognition's annualized revenue had reached $400 million.
Johnny Ho: Net Worth $2.1 Billion, Once Considered Acquiring TikTok and Chrome
Like Scott Wu, Harvard graduate Johnny Ho won three gold medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics, achieving a perfect score and first place in 2012.
In August 2022, Johnny Ho co-founded Perplexity with Aravind Srinivas, Andy Konwinski, and Denis Yarats. Perplexity is positioned as an AI search engine company, offering a conversational search engine service that displays citation sources for answers and provides related question suggestions.
In 2023, Perplexity's monthly visits reached 10 million; by April 2024, its monthly active users reached approximately 15 million. That same year, Perplexity embarked on a疯狂融资 spree. In its fourth funding round at the end of the year, it raised $5 [Note: Likely a typo, probably meant $500 million or similar, but translating as written], reaching a valuation of $9 billion. In July 2025, Perplexity completed another $100 million in new funding, raising its valuation to $18 billion.
It is worth mentioning that Perplexity has initiated several bold "minnow-swallowing-whale" level acquisition proposals (with VCs willing to provide funds), including an offer to acquire TikTok in early 2025, proposing to merge Perplexity, TikTok's US operations, and new capital partners into a new entity, and in August 2025, proposing to Google to acquire its core product, the Chrome browser, for $34.5 billion.
According to the latest data from Forbes, Perplexity's current valuation has reached $20 billion, and Johnny Ho's personal wealth has reached $2.1 billion.
Jesse Zhang: AI Startup Valued at $4.5 Billion in Three Years
Jesse Zhang was also born in 1997 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. From high school, Jesse Zhang was a typical "competition fanatic" — selected twice for the Mathematical Olympiad Program (MOP), a finalist in the Intel STS, and participated in MIT's RSI research program. After entering Harvard, Jesse Zhang completed the four-year university curriculum in just three years.
In 2018, Jesse Zhang and friends founded Lowkey, a platform for sharing gaming highlights. The project received seed funding from Y Combinator and Series A funding from a16z. In 2021, Lowkey was acquired by Pokémon GO developer Niantic for an undisclosed amount.
In 2023, Jesse Zhang co-founded Decagon with partner Ashwin Sreenivas, focusing on using AI Agents to automate enterprise customer service, solving the problems of high labor costs and low efficiency in call centers.
In June 2024, shortly after its founding, Decagon quickly raised $35 million, including a $5 million seed round led by a16z and a $30 million Series A led by Accel. Four months later, Decagon raised $65 million in a Series B round. In June 2025, a Series C round raised $131 million, pushing the valuation to $1.5 billion. In January 2026, a Series D round raised $250 million, skyrocketing the valuation to $4.5 billion... In tandem with the rising valuation was Decagon's revenue capability. By the end of 2025, the company's disclosed annual revenue had exceeded $30 million.
Demi Guo: Hangzhou '95er, Pioneer in AI Video Generation
Demi Guo was born in 1999 in Hangzhou, China, and moved to Silicon Valley, USA with her family during childhood.
Demi Guo won a silver medal at the 2015 International Olympiad in Informatics. She graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in computer science, then dropped out of a PhD program at Stanford University to focus on entrepreneurship in generative AI video content creation.
In April 2023, Demi Guo co-founded Pika with Chenlin Meng, with Demi Guo serving as CEO. Pika focuses on the development of video generation AI technology. Its core products include the Pika 1.0 and Pika 2.0 models, which support 3D animation, anime, cartoon, and cinematic style generation, offering features like video extension, canvas expansion, and element replacement.
Regarding funding, Pika had already completed a $20 million seed round before its launch. It then completed a $35 million Series A round in November 2023, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. In June 2024, Pika completed an $80 million Series B round at a valuation of $470 million, led by Spark Capital, with participation from Greycroft, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and actor Jared Leto, among others.
Steven Hao: AI Tech Guru with a Net Worth Over $1 Billion
Steven Hao, a graduate of MIT's mathematics department, also won a gold medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). He was a partner of Alexandr Wang at Scale AI and has now joined Scott Wu's Cognition as CTO. Both companies have been详细介绍 in the previous sections, so they won't be elaborated on here.
According to Forbes data, the 30-year-old Steven Hao's personal wealth is estimated to have reached $1.3 billion.
Epilogue: We Might Be Witnessing a New Legend
I thought about giving this small circle a new name similar to the "PayPal Mafia," like calling them the "Hudson River Mafia," or the broader "Olympiad Mafia"... Although the era, background, and story trajectory are completely different, they seem to share the same core spirit as the previous generation's "PayPal Mafia" — behind the camaraderie of high-stakes competitions, what truly connects them is a shared pursuit of intellectual density, engineering efficiency, and system re-architecting capabilities, along with a profound judgment of where the future begins.
The new generation of entrepreneurs has stepped onto the stage. Before them lies the question, far more difficult than any Olympiad problem: "How will AI reshape the world?" This is their battlefield and their stage.
