Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
13% on SWE-bench, 87% failure
A prototype, no product
There was no product yet, only a prototype and a demo of what was possible. The company had no customers and no revenue, and the reaction split to extremes: some people thought it was the coolest thing ever, some feared everyone would lose their job tomorrow, and some called it a scam.
No right to win
Cognition started in early 2024, more than a year after ChatGPT launched, years after GitHub Copilot, and long after OpenAI and Google. A new company has no resources, people, or brand awareness, and so no right to win. What it can do is plant a flag on what it believes the future is and run toward it.
The flag in the ground
The flag was working with AI as a coworker rather than a chatbot or autocomplete. Many details turned out wrong, and being early was a fair criticism, but over the following couple of years the coworker idea grew into something the whole field now builds on. Being first to plant it mattered for the brand, for recruiting, and for customers.
How is SWE-bench scored?
SWE-bench was released in 2023 by researchers at Princeton. It contains 2,294 real issues from 12 popular open-source Python projects on GitHub. A model must write a patch for each issue, and the patch counts as correct only if it passes the project's tests. The score is the percentage of issues resolved.
When did GitHub Copilot arrive?
GitHub released Copilot as a technical preview in June 2021. It was built on OpenAI's Codex model and suggested code as developers typed in their editor. It became generally available in June 2022. That meant autocomplete-style coding tools had been on the market for more than a year before ChatGPT launched.
Why does being first matter for a brand?
Marketing researchers call the effect first-mover advantage, and it is strongest when a name becomes shorthand for a category. A company that defines an idea early gets mentioned whenever the idea comes up. Press coverage, job candidates, and customers all start from that association. Kleenex and Xerox became names for whole product types that way.
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