I recently came across an interview with Jeff Yan, the founder of Hyperliquid, which revealed a pretty interesting story—turns out, during an internship program at the top quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading, a group of geniuses who later shined brightly in the AI field gathered. Among these 10 interns, besides Jeff Yan who chose the crypto space, most of the others became industry leaders in the wave of AI entrepreneurship.

I took a close look at the list of members in this circle, and it’s truly astonishing. Alexandr Wang, head of Meta AI business division; Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition; Johnny Ho, co-founder of Perplexity—these names are well-known in the tech world. But what’s even more interesting is that their friendship goes far beyond the internship. According to Scott Wu himself, the roots of this circle go even earlier—back in high school, they met through the International Olympiad in Informatics, and the circle also includes prominent figures like Pika CEO Guo Timi and Steven Hao, a partner at Scale AI.

Interestingly, when he was 19, Alexandr Wang once told his friends: “Why can’t it be us?”—they were talking about the story of the PayPal Mafia. Ten years later, it seems that this has truly come true.

Let’s start with Alexandr Wang. Born in 1997 in New Mexico, his parents are physicists. He’s been a math and programming prodigy since childhood. After dropping out of MIT in 2015, he founded Scale AI, focusing on AI training data annotation. In June 2025, Meta acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.3 billion, with the condition that Alexandr Wang must join Meta to lead AI development. The recent release of Meta’s first self-developed AI model, Muse Spark, is the result of his leadership at the super-intelligent lab, and it’s considered Meta’s most powerful model to date.

Scott Wu’s story is equally impressive. A three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics, in 2023 he co-founded Cognition, launching Devin, the world’s first autonomous AI software engineer. In just three years, Cognition’s valuation skyrocketed to $10.2 billion, with annual revenue reaching $400 million.

Johnny Ho is also extraordinary. A Harvard graduate who scored perfect marks and ranked first in the International Olympiad in Informatics. His company Perplexity, founded in 2022, is now valued at $20 billion, and Johnny Ho’s personal wealth exceeds $2.1 billion. Perplexity has even proposed bold acquisitions like TikTok and Chrome.

Jesse Zhang’s Decagon, focused on AI customer service automation, reached a valuation of $4.5 billion in less than three years. Demi Guo’s Pika has established itself in the video-generating AI field. Steven Hao is now CTO of Cognition, with personal wealth estimated to have surpassed $1.3 billion.

Looking closely at this circle, their true commonality isn’t background or education but an obsessive pursuit of intellectual density, engineering efficiency, and system reconstruction capabilities. From meeting in high school Olympiads, to collaborating during university internships, to founding their own companies in the AI era, they seem to be reenacting the story of the PayPal Mafia—but this time, the battlefield is how AI will reshape the world. These young people are stirring up the era in their own way, and this is just the beginning.