Just noticed something wild in the AI scene that's worth paying attention to. There's this tight-knit circle of people who basically grew up dominating math and programming competitions, and now they're literally reshaping the entire AI landscape. It's giving major PayPal Mafia vibes, except this time it's all about artificial intelligence.

So here's the thread: Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan did an interview recently where he casually dropped that during his Harvard days, he was part of this exclusive HRT internship program—only 10 people got selected. But it wasn't just any internship cohort. Among those 10 were people who are now running some of the most valuable AI companies in the world.

We're talking Alexandr Wang, who's literally heading up Meta's AI development now (Meta paid $14.3 billion just to get him on board). Scott Wu, who founded Cognition and built Devin, an autonomous AI engineer that's outperforming GPT-4. Johnny Ho, who co-founded Perplexity and is now worth $2.1 billion personally. Then there's Demi Guo, running Pika, the AI video generation company everyone's talking about. And Jesse Zhang with Decagon, which just hit a $4.5 billion valuation.

But here's the thing—the HRT internship wasn't even where they first connected. Most of them had already met years earlier through Olympiad competitions. Like, these weren't just smart kids. They were gold medalists at the International Olympiad in Informatics, the Math Olympiad, the whole thing. Scott Wu won three gold medals. Johnny Ho got a perfect score once. Alexandr Wang qualified for basically every competition that mattered.

When they were just teenagers, Alexandr Wang apparently looked at his friends and said something like, 'Why can't we be the next PayPal Mafia?' Fast forward to now, and honestly? It's actually happening.

The valuations are insane. Cognition hit $10.2 billion. Perplexity is at $20 billion. Scale AI, where Alexandr was before Meta, was valued at $7.3 billion before the acquisition. Pika's at $470 million and growing. Decagon just closed a Series D at $4.5 billion. These aren't just successful startups—they're reshaping how companies build AI infrastructure and deploy it at scale.

What's fascinating is that it's not just about the money or the valuations. It's the caliber of people, the way they think about problems, and how they're all pushing each other forward. You've got Muse Spark, Meta's new multimodal model that Alexandr's team just released. You've got Devin, the autonomous engineer from Cognition. You've got Perplexity becoming an actual competitor to Google. Demi Guo's video generation tech is opening up entirely new possibilities.

They're not competing in a cutthroat way—they're more like a network that keeps elevating each other. Steven Hao went from Scale to Cognition as CTO. They all seem to genuinely respect what the others are building.

If you zoom out, this is what happens when you get a group of people with elite intellectual capacity, deep technical skills, and a shared vision about where AI is heading. They all kind of knew each other at the right time, stayed connected, and now they're collectively pushing the entire industry forward.

It's wild to watch. The PayPal Mafia had Elon and Peter Thiel. This generation has a whole roster of people who are all operating at the highest level simultaneously. Makes you wonder what the next five years looks like if they keep collaborating and building.