Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
Yesterday, a feature interview with Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan by Colossos magazine went viral online ( related reading: 11 people, zero funding, $900 million a year: The crazy life of Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan ).
In the interview, Jeff Yan revealed a little-known story—during his junior year at Harvard, he participated in the first internship program at Hudson River Trading (HRT), a quantitative trading giant, where 10 interns were selected. Aside from Jeff Yan, who chose the cryptocurrency track, many of his fellow interns have become prominent figures in the AI field, including Alexandr Wang, head of Meta AI; Jesse Zhang, founder and CEO of Decagon; and Scott Wu, founder and CEO of Cognition.
Odaily Note: A group photo of this year's interns shared by Jesse Zhang.
According to Scott Wu's additional disclosure, the HRT internship program was not the starting point of their friendship. Many of them had already met during high school through the Olympiad competitions (Jeff Yan, Scott Wu, and many others had won gold medals). That small circle also included many other prominent 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 at Scale AI…
During the formative years of Jeff Yan and Scott Wu, the "PayPal Mafia," represented by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, was already a force to be reckoned with in the business world, and people began searching for the next similar special network. Jeff Yan's inner circle had also discussed this topic; 19-year-old Alexandr Wang once said to his friends, "Why can't it be us?"
Ten years have passed, and Alexandr Wang's bold prediction now seems to be coming true. Leveraging AI, this group of young people on the banks of the Hudson River are stirring up the times in their own way.
Alexandr Wang: Zuckerberg's AI Brain
Alexandr Wang is perhaps the most well-known person in this small circle. Born in Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1997, Alexandr Wang is of Chinese descent. His parents were physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory—the 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, the U.S. Physics Team in 2014, and reached the finals of the U.S. Computer Olympiad in 2012 and 2013.
In 2015, Alexandr Wang dropped out of MIT and founded Scale AI the following year, annotating data used to train AI in computer vision and audio transcription. Riding the wave of the AI boom, Scale AI's valuation soared, reaching $7.3 billion in 2021, and Alexandr Wang, who owned 15% of the company, saw his net worth exceed $1 billion.
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. Zuckerberg's condition was that Alexandr Wang, the key figure in Scale AI, who was only 28 years old at the time, had to join Meta. Alexandr Wang then joined Meta and began to take charge of Meta's AI development team, "Meta Superintelligence Labs" (MSL).
On the night of April 8th, Zuckerberg's gamble paid off as MSL officially released its first self-developed AI model, Muse Spark. Muse Spark is a native multimodal inference model that supports tool calls, visual chaining, and multi-agent orchestration. This is the most powerful model Meta has ever released. During training, MSL observed predictable scalability improvements in pre-training, reinforcement learning, and inference during testing.
Scott Wu: Olympiad champion, a rising star in AI with a valuation of billions.
Scott Wu was born in 1997 in Louisiana to a Chinese immigrant background. Growing up, Scott Wu actively participated in programming and mathematics competitions, winning three gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, including first place in 2014.
After graduating from high school, Scott Wu attended Harvard University but dropped out after two years. During his undergraduate studies at Harvard College, he participated in the 2016 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) as a member of the school team, which won a gold medal and achieved a third-place overall ranking.
In 2019, Scott Wu co-founded the social platform Lunchclub as its co-founder and chief technology officer. In 2023, Scott Wu co-founded Cognition with his friends Steven Hao and Walden Yan (both Olympic gold medalists), serving as its CEO.
In 2024, the Cognition team launched Devin, the world's first autonomous AI software engineer. This product can independently complete code writing, testing, and deployment, and supports the decomposition and collaboration of complex tasks. In the SWE-bench benchmark test, its performance significantly outperformed GPT-4. In May of the same year, Cognition secured $175 million in funding led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, reaching a post-money valuation of $2 billion. In September 2025, Cognition raised another $400 million, pushing the company's valuation to $10.2 billion.
As of early 2026, Cognition's annualized revenue had reached $400 million.
Johnny Ho: Net worth $2.1 billion, previously interested in acquiring TikTok and Chrome.
Like Scott Wu, Johnny Ho, a Harvard graduate, won three gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, including a perfect score in 2012, ranking first.
In August 2022, Johnny Ho co-founded Perplexity with Aravind Srinivas, Andy Konwinski, and Denis Yarats. Perplexity positions itself as an AI search engine company that provides conversational search engine services, displaying citation sources for answers and offering relevant question suggestions.
In 2023, Perplexity had already reached 10 million monthly visits; by April 2024, its monthly active users had reached approximately 15 million. That same year, Perplexity embarked on a frenzied fundraising campaign, raising $5 million in its fourth funding round at the end of the year, reaching a valuation of $9 billion; in July 2025, Perplexity completed another $100 million funding round, raising its valuation to $18 billion.
It's worth noting that Perplexity has made several bold acquisition proposals of "David and Goliath" scale (with venture capitalists willing to fund them), including a takeover bid for TikTok in early 2025, which aimed to merge Perplexity, TikTok's US operations, and a new capital partner into a new entity, and a proposal to Google in August 2025 to acquire its core product, the Chrome browser, for $34.5 billion.
According to the latest data from Forbes, Perplexity is now valued at $20 billion, and Johnny Ho's personal wealth has reached $2.1 billion.
Jesse Zhang: Three years into his AI startup, the company is valued at $4.5 billion.
Jesse Zhang was also born in 1997 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. From high school onwards, Jesse Zhang was a typical "competition fanatic"—he was selected twice for the US Mathematical Olympiad (MOP), reached the finals of the Intel STS, and participated in MIT's RSI research project. After entering Harvard, Jesse Zhang completed four years of university coursework in just three years.
In 2018, Jesse Zhang and his friends founded Lowkey, a gaming highlight sharing platform. The project received seed funding from Y Combinator and Series A funding from a16z. In 2021, Lowkey was acquired by Niantic, the developer of Pokémon GO, for an undisclosed price.
In 2023, Jesse Zhang and his partner Ashwin Sreenivas co-founded Decagon, focusing on using AI agents to automate enterprise customer service and solve the problems of high labor costs and low efficiency in customer service centers.
In June 2024, the newly established Decagon quickly secured $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 Series B funding. In June 2025, it raised $131 million in Series C funding, pushing its valuation to $1.5 billion. In January 2026, it raised $250 million in Series D funding, with its valuation soaring to $4.5 billion. Along with its rising valuation, Decagon's revenue generation capabilities also increased. By the end of 2025, the company's disclosed annual revenue had exceeded $30 million.
Demi Guo: A post-95s generation from Hangzhou, a pioneer in AI video generation.
Demi Guo was born in Hangzhou, China in 1999, and moved to Silicon Valley, USA with her family 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 degree in mathematics and a master's degree in computer science, and then dropped out of her doctoral program at Stanford University to focus on her entrepreneurial career in generative AI video content creation.
In April 2023, Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng co-founded Pika, with Demi Guo serving as CEO. Pika focuses on the development of AI technology for video generation. Its core products include the Pika 1.0 and Pika 2.0 models, which support the generation of 3D animation, comics, cartoons, and movie styles, and provide functions such as video extension, canvas expansion, and element replacement.
In terms of financing, Pika had already completed a $20 million seed round of financing before its official launch; then in November 2023, it completed a $35 million Series A financing round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; in June 2024, Pika completed an $80 million Series B financing 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 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 CTO. Both companies have been described in detail earlier, so they will not be repeated here.
According to Forbes data, Steven Hao, who is only 30 years old, is now estimated to have a personal fortune of $1.3 billion.
Epilogue: We may be witnessing a new legend.
I've considered giving this small circle a new name similar to the "PayPal Mafia," such as the "Hudson River Mafia" or the broader "Olympia Mafia"... Although the historical context and story trajectory are completely different, they seem to share the same core spirit as the previous generation of the "PayPal Mafia"—behind the camaraderie of Olympia, what truly connects them is a shared pursuit of intellectual density, engineering efficiency, and system refactoring capabilities, as well as a profound prediction of where the future will begin.
A new generation of entrepreneurs has stepped into the spotlight. Before them lies the question of "How will AI reshape the world?"—a question far more challenging than the International Mathematical Olympiad. This is their battlefield, and their stage.
