Author｜Azuma (@azuma_eth)
Yesterday, a featured interview with Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan in *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 at the quantitative trading giant Hudson River Trading (HRT). Only 10 interns were selected that year. Apart from Jeff Yan, who chose the 加密currency path, several of his fellow interns have since become prominent figures in the AI field, including Meta’s AI business line head Alexandr Wang, Decagon founder and CEO Jesse Zhang, and Cognition founder and CEO Scott Wu.
Odaily Note: Group photo of that year’s interns shared by Jesse Zhang
According to additional disclosures by Scott Wu himself, the HRT internship was not the starting point of their friendship. As early as high school, many of them had already met through Olympiad competitions (Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and several others had won gold medals). That small circle included even 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, leading people to search for the next similar special network. Jeff Yan’s small circle had also discussed this topic. The 19-year-old Alexandr Wang once asked his friends, “Why can’t it be us?”
A decade later, Alexandr Wang’s bold statement seems to be coming true. Leveraging AI, this group of young people from the Hudson River is stirring the times 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, he is the descendant of Chinese immigrants. His parents were physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory — where the United States secretly developed its first atomic bomb during World War II.
Alexandr Wang has been passionate about mathematics and programming since childhood. He qualified for the Mathematical Olympiad Program in 2013, for the U.S. Physics Team in 2014, and was a finalist in the USA Computing Olympiad in both 2012 and 2013.
In 2015, Alexandr Wang dropped out of MIT and founded Scale AI the following year, focusing on annotating 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. With a 15% stake, Alexandr Wang’s net worth surpassed the $1 billion mark.
In June 2025, Meta, which had clearly fallen behind in the AI race, spent $14.3 billion to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI. Mark Zuckerberg’s additional condition was that the soul of Scale AI, the then 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, had to join Meta. Alexandr Wang subsequently joined Meta and began overseeing Meta’s AI development team, the “Meta Superintelligence Labs” (MSL).
On the night of April 8th, Zuckerberg’s big bet paid off as MSL officially launched its first self-developed AI model, Muse Spark. Muse Spark is a native multimodal reasoning model supporting tool calling, 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 across the model’s pre-training, reinforcement learning, and inference testing phases.
Scott Wu: Olympiad Prodigy, Creator of a $10 Billion AI Unicorn
Scott Wu was born in 1997 in Louisiana to a Chinese immigrant family. Growing up, he actively participated in programming and mathematics competitions, winning three gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), including first place in 2014.
After high school, Scott Wu attended Harvard University but dropped out after two years. During his undergraduate studies at Harvard College, he was a member of the university team that competed in the 2016 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), winning a gold medal and placing third overall.
In 2019, Scott Wu co-founded the social platform Lunchclub, serving as its CTO. In 2023, he co-founded Cognition with friends Steven Hao and Walden Yan (both also IOI gold medalists), taking on the role of CEO.
In 2024, the Cognition team launched Devin, the world’s first autonomous AI software engineer. The product can independently complete coding, testing, and deployment, supports the decomposition and collaboration of complex tasks, and significantly outperformed GPT-4 on the SWE-bench benchmark. In May of the same year, Cognition raised $175 million in a round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, reaching a post-money valuation of $2 billion. In September 2025, Cognition raised another $400 million, with its valuation soaring to $10.2 billion.
As of early 2026, Cognition’s annualized revenue had reached $400 million.
Johnny Ho: Net Worth $2.1 Billion, Once Aimed to Acquire TikTok and Chrome
Like Scott Wu, Harvard graduate Johnny Ho won three gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, ranking first with a perfect score 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 its answers and provides related follow-up questions.
In 2023, Perplexity’s monthly visits reached 10 million; by April 2024, its monthly active users had reached approximately 15 million. That same year, Perplexity embarked on a frenzied fundraising spree. In its fourth funding round at the end of the year, it raised $5 billion, 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 noting that Perplexity has initiated several bold “snake swallowing an elephant” level acquisition proposals (with VCs willing to fund them), including an offer to acquire TikTok in early 2025, proposing to merge Perplexity, TikTok’s U.S. business, and new capital partners into a new entity, and a proposal to Google in August 2025 to buy its core product, the Chrome browser, for $34.5 billion.
According to the latest data from Forbes, Perplexity’s current valuation is as high as $20 billion, and Johnny Ho’s personal wealth has reached $2.1 billion.
Jesse Zhang: Three Years in AI, $4.5 Billion Valuation
Jesse Zhang was also born in 1997 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since high school, he has been a typical “competition enthusiast” — selected twice for the Mathematical Olympiad Program (MOP), a finalist in the Intel STS, and a participant in MIT’s RSI research program. After entering Harvard, Jesse Zhang completed his four-year undergraduate coursework in just three years.
In 2018, Jesse Zhang co-founded Lowkey, a platform for sharing gaming highlights, with friends. The project received seed funding from Y Combinator and Series A funding from a16z. In 2021, Lowkey was acquired by Pokémon GO developer Niantic, with the specific acquisition price undisclosed.
In 2023, Jesse Zhang co-founded Decagon with partner Ashwin Sreenivas, focusing on automating enterprise customer service using AI Agents to solve the problems of high labor costs and low efficiency in call centers.
In June 2024, the newly established Decagon quickly raised $35 million in funding, including a $5 million seed round led by a16z and a $30 million Series A round led by Accel. Four months later, Decagon raised another $65 million in a Series B round. In June 2025, a $131 million Series C round pushed its valuation to $1.5 billion. In January 2026, a $250 million Series D round skyrocketed its valuation to $4.5 billion… In line with its rising valuation is Decagon’s revenue-generating capability. By the end of 2025, the company’s disclosed annual revenue capacity exceeded $30 million.
Demi Guo: Hangzhou-born ’95s, Pioneer in AI Video Generation
Demi Guo was born in 1999 in Hangzhou, China, and moved with her family to Silicon Valley, USA, during her childhood.
Demi Guo won a silver medal at the 2015 International Olympiad in Informatics. She graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor’s in Mathematics and a Master’s in Computer Science, later dropping out of a Stanford Ph.D. program to focus on entrepreneurship in generative AI video content creation.
In April 2023, Demi Guo co-founded Pika with Chenlin Meng, serving as CEO. Pika focuses on developing 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 official 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 $470 million valuation, led by Spark Capital, with participation from Greycroft, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and actor Jared Leto, among others.
Steven Hao: AI Tech Prodigy with a Net Worth Over $1 Billion
Steven Hao, a graduate of MIT’s Mathematics department, also won a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). He was Alexandr Wang’s partner at Scale AI and has now joined Scott Wu’s Cognition as its CTO. Both companies have been detailed earlier, so we won’t elaborate further here.
Forbes data shows that the 30-year-old Steven Hao’s current personal wealth is estimated to be $1.3 billion.
Epilogue: We May Be Witnessing a New Legend
I considered giving this small circle a new name similar to the “PayPal Mafia,” perhaps calling them the “Hudson River Mafia,” or the broader “Olympiad Mafia”… Although the era and the narrative are entirely 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 reconstruction capabilities, along with a profound foresight about where the future begins.
A new generation of entrepreneurs has stepped onto the stage. Before them lies the question, “How will AI reshape the world?” — a test far more challenging than any Olympiad. This is their battlefield, and also their stage.
本文来源于互联网： The “PayPal Mafia” of the AI Era: From Internship Buddies to Billionaires
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