Ep 147: Scott Wu & Russell Kaplan on the New Era of Software Abundance

About this episode

Scott Wu and Russell Kaplan discuss the future of software engineering and AI with Joe Lonsdale.

Scott Wu and Russell Kaplan, co-founders of Cognition, are leading one of the fastest-growing, talent-dense AI companies. Their mission: make expert software engineering ubiquitous. What does a world of software abundance look like? How is Cognition delivering massive productivity gains inside some of the largest companies and organizations? And can AI finally modernize the broken, $100 billion government IT systems? We discuss these and other timely topics with Scott and Russell. Scott was a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and world champion at age 17. After high school, we hired him at Addepar, where he became a top software engineer. Russell began his career as a machine learning engineer on Tesla’s Autopilot team before selling his video data company, Helia, to Scale AI. In 2023, Scott and Russell co-founded Cognition, and a year later, they shocked the technology world with the release of Devin, the first AI software agent. We begin our conversation by discussing the incredible collection of young talent at Cognition, and why the next generation has new advantages in the AI era. Next, we catch up on Cognition’s explosive growth: Devin…

People in this episode

Host: Joe Lonsdale

Guests: Scott Wu, Russell Kaplan

Topics covered

• AI
• software engineering
• productivity
• technology growth
• government IT systems

Keywords

• AI companies
• software abundance
• Cognition
• productivity gains
• government IT

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cognition, Addepar, Tesla, Scale AI

Products: Devin

Places: United States

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