A photo of the leaders of Meta AI, and the hundred-billion-dollar Chinese network behind it

Original | Odaily（@OdailyChina）

Author｜Azuma（@azuma_eth）

Today, a seemingly casual everyday selfie sparked a collective frenzy across both the AI and Crypto communities on X.

The photo was posted by Alexandr Wang, Meta's Chief AI Officer and co-founder of Scale AI. In his frame, two other young faces are equally illustrious — in the center is Scott Wu, founder and CEO of AI coding unicorn Cognition, valued at over $10 billion; on the left is Jeff Yan, founder of Hyperliquid, which now sits firmly atop the onchain derivatives throne.

Alexandr Wang captioned the photo with a brief line: "Got the HRT gang back together!"

Anyone with some understanding of the frontiers of AI and Crypto would find it hard not to feel moved by this photo. The three young men in the frame are barely around thirty, dressed in the plainest everyday clothes, yet each of them has stirred up massive waves in their respective tracks, with personal fortunes now measured in the billions of dollars.

As for the "HRT" mentioned in the caption, it refers to one of Wall Street's high-frequency quantitative trading giants — Hudson River Trading. About a decade ago, these three were classmates in HRT's inaugural internship program.

From quantitative interns back then to today's AI giant helmsman, AI coding pioneer, and architect of a Crypto-native financial empire — the intersections and rise of these three young men constitute one of the most hardcore business legends of this era.

The "Three Titans" in the Photo

If you zoom in and dissect the resumes of these three protagonists one by one, you'll find striking similarities in their life trajectories: Chinese-American backgrounds, frequent competitors at Olympiads, elite university credentials, early baptism in quantitative trading, and precision strikes at the风口 of the times.

Alexandr Wang: The "AI Brain" Zuckerberg Paid Dearly For

Alexandr Wang, who posted the group photo, is perhaps the most widely known of the three.

Born in 1997 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to a family of Chinese immigrants, Alexandr Wang's parents were physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (the site where the Manhattan Project developed the first atomic bomb during World War II).

Alexandr Wang was passionate about mathematics and programming from an early age. He qualified for the Math Olympiad Program in 2013, earned a spot on the U.S. Physics Team in 2014, and reached the finals of the USA Computing Olympiad in 2012 and 2013.

In 2015, Alexandr Wang dropped out of MIT and a year later founded Scale AI, which annotates data used to train AI in computer vision and audio transcription. Riding the tailwinds of the AI boom, Scale AI's valuation soared, reaching $7.3 billion by 2021, and Alexandr Wang, who held a 15% stake, saw his net worth break through 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. Zuckerberg's附加 condition was that Scale AI's soul figure, the then 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, must join Meta. Alexandr Wang promptly joined Meta and took charge of leading Meta's AI development team, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).

Now, Zuckerberg's bold bet is finally paying off — under Alexandr Wang's leadership, Meta has returned to the center of the AI race table. Meta has just released two new models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, which in multiple industry benchmarks now rival the top models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Scott Wu: Perfect-Score Olympiad Prodigy, Creator of a $50 Billion Unicorn 

Scott Wu, also born in 1997, is a "god-tier" figure in competitive programming circles.

He won three consecutive gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and took first place in the world with a perfect score in 2014. After entering Harvard, he represented the school team in the 2016 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), winning a gold medal and a third-place overall ranking.

After an early social entrepreneurship attempt (Lunchclub), Scott Wu co-founded Cognition in 2023 with two fellow Olympiad gold medalists, Steven Hao and Walden Yan, and serves as CEO. In 2024, Cognition launched Devin, the world's first autonomous AI software engineer, capable of independently writing, debugging, and deploying complex code — completely igniting the AI Agent track.

Capital追捧 followed. Cognition has completed multiple funding rounds to date, the most recent in September this year — Cognition has just announced the completion of over $2 billion in Series E funding, led by a16z and Accel, at a post-money valuation of $48 billion.

Jeff Yan: The Only One Who Went into Crypto, Aiming to Reshape the Financial World

For the Crypto industry, the third protagonist in the photo, Jeff Yan, is undoubtedly the most familiar legend (see "Jeff Yan's "Hyper Life"").

Two years older than the other two, Jeff Yan is likewise an uncompromising "competition maniac." In high school, he self-studied physics and calculus to make the U.S. Physics Olympiad national team, going on to win one silver and one gold at the International Physics Olympiad (IPhO). After entering Harvard on a full scholarship, he became close friends with Scott Wu, who was two years his junior.

In the winter of his junior year at Harvard, Jeff Yan and Scott Wu were both selected for HRT's inaugural winter internship program, which had only 10 spots. It was a three-week high-intensity algorithm competition, and in every round of internal head-to-heads, Jeff Yan and Scott Wu unsurprisingly swept the top two spots.

After graduating from Harvard with bachelor's and master's degrees and briefly working full-time at HRT, Jeff Yan was inspired by the Ethereum Yellow Paper and decided to use code to reshape financial markets. At the end of 2019, he founded crypto quantitative market maker Chameleon Trading with $10,000 in initial capital. Within just two and a half years, he earned massive profits in the crypto market, achieving complete financial freedom at 27.

The FTX blowup at the end of 2022 prompted him to embark on his next chapter. He launched Hyperliquid with his own funds, taking not a single dollar from VCs, and with a lean team of just over ten people, he single-handedly built on a self-developed Layer 1 the perpetual futures empire that now dominates the onchain market.

In 2025, this tiny team of just over ten people generated an astonishing profit of over $900 million; the massive HYPE airdrop also created one of the most spectacular community wealth-creation myths in crypto history.

The Billion-Dollar Circle Beyond the Photo

If the story stopped at the three people in the photo, it might only count as a heartwarming tale of "genius best friends meeting at the summit." But as Colossus magazine revealed in its Jeff Yan interview earlier this year — these three are actually just the tip of a much larger and more astonishing elite network.

That inaugural HRT internship with only 10 spots, and the circle of classmates they formed even earlier at high school Olympiad training camps, have now essentially come to dominate half of Silicon Valley and tech entrepreneurship.

Zoom out and look at the other members of this small circle — the roster is still nothing short of stunning:

• Jesse Zhang (Founder and CEO of Decagon): Also born in 1997, another member of that 10-person HRT internship cohort. He made the U.S. Math Olympiad training team twice in high school and completed four years of Harvard coursework in three. He founded AI customer-service automation company Decagon in 2023; after completing a $250 million Series D round in January this year, its valuation has soared to $4.5 billion.
• Johnny Ho (Co-founder and CSO of Perplexity): A Harvard alumnus and core member of the Olympiad circle since junior year of high school, he won three IOI gold medals (first in the world with a perfect score in 2012). In 2022, he co-founded Perplexity, now one of the hottest AI search engines. In August this year, market rumors suggested Nvidia was interested in investing in the company, with its valuation rising to $30 billion.
• Steven Hao (Co-founder and CTO of Cognition): A graduate of MIT's math department and an IOI gold medalist. He is not only an old acquaintance within the circle but also the key figure linking the other two protagonists in the photo — he was an early core partner when Alexandr Wang founded Scale AI, and now co-founded Cognition with Scott Wu and serves as CTO. His personal net worth has long exceeded $1 billion.
• Demi Guo (Co-founder and CEO of Pika): Born in 1999 in Hangzhou and raised in Silicon Valley, she is an IOI silver medalist and Harvard alumna. After dropping out of a Stanford PhD program, she founded AI video generation unicorn Pika, long a star company in the generative video space, valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.

That Line at 19: "Why Can't It Be Us?"

In Silicon Valley's business history, the "PayPal Mafia" — represented by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and others — has long been an insurmountable totem. For the past two decades, the tech world has been searching for the next special network with comparable dominance.

Few know that in that summer ten years ago, before any of them had made their fortunes, Jeff Yan, Alexandr Wang, and Scott Wu — these teenagers who had just walked out of high school Olympiad exam halls and were squeezed into intern desks at a quantitative firm — also passionately discussed the story of the "PayPal Mafia."

At the time, the then 19-year-old Alexandr Wang threw out a bold declaration to his friends: "Why can't it be us?"

Ten years have passed in a flash. As Alexandr Wang raises his phone again today to take this group photo with Scott Wu and Jeff Yan, the rhetorical question he posed in his youthful ardor has become reality.

You can call them the "HRT Mafia," or the "Olympiad Mafia." Though they operate in two seemingly distinct tracks — AI and Crypto — the underlying thread that truly connects them has never changed: a fervent pursuit of extreme intellectual density, engineering efficiency, and the reconstruction of foundational systems. The legends of the previous generation of titans continue, but this group of young people who emerged from the banks of the Hudson River have already fully taken up the scepter of this era.