# Silas Alberti

![Silas Alberti](/resources/cognition/portraits/silas-alberti.webp)

Chief Research Officer & Founding Team @ Cognition | prev: AI PhD @ Stanford, DeepMind, Jane Street  
Cognition  
San Francisco, California, United States

## At Cognition

- Role: Chief Research Officer (Leadership)
- Joined: Mar 2024
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Student Researcher, Google DeepMind
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Stanford University; UC Berkeley (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/silasalberti
- X: @silasalberti
- GitHub: https://github.com/silasalberti
- Website: https://sil.as/

## Notes
- Silas Alberti is Chief Research Officer at Cognition, a role listed as Oct 2026-present. (https://www.turingtree.com/people/silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti is on the founding team and is Head of Research at Cognition, a role listed as Mar 2024 – Present. (https://www.alphaxiv.org/@silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti is currently at Cognition AI working on Devin. (https://sil.as/)
- Silas Alberti is the Chief Research Officer at Cognition, the team behind Devin and Windsurf. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mihaileric_silas-alberti-the-chief-research-officer-activity-7520908687671177216-EzwU)
- Silas Alberti leads the research team at Cognition. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTAjvDT5S9I)
- Silas Alberti is Cognition's Head of Research. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/modal-labs_our-head-of-inference-richard-gong-sat-activity-7488353409738321920-atQS)
- Silas Alberti leads the team at Cognition that trains and tests the models behind Devin, the company's autonomous AI software engineer. (https://claude.com/blog/working-at-the-frontier-how-cognition-trusts-claude-fable-5-to-work-through-the-night)
- Silas Alberti is identified as the CTO of Cognition, the company that develops AI coding agents including Devin. (https://nebiusatlas.com/customers/cognition)
- Silas Alberti was previously SVP, Research at Cognition in 2026 and was part of the founding team from 2024 to 2026. (https://www.turingtree.com/people/silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti was one of three Stanford graduate students who designed the PIGEON (Predicting Image Geolocations) project. (https://www.kqed.org/news/11970442/stanford-students-develop-ai-that-can-pinpoint-your-photo-locations)
- Silas Alberti is an AI PhD student at Stanford University, listed as Sep 2022 – Present, co-advised by Stefano Ermon and Chris Ré. (https://www.alphaxiv.org/@silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti is a co-founder and advisor at Cofactory. (https://sil.as/)
- Silas Alberti was formerly a PhD student in AI at Stanford, co-advised by Stefano Ermon and Chris Re. (https://sil.as/)
- Silas Alberti is described as a founding team member at Cognition. (https://www.aicouncil.com/speakers/silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti leads research on Cognition's AI coding products. (https://www.aicouncil.com/speakers/silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti leads the research behind Cognition's coding models, including SWE-2, the first one they trained with effort levels. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mihaileric_silas-alberti-the-chief-research-officer-activity-7520908687671177216-EzwU)
- Silas Alberti leads research on Cognition's coding models, including SWE-2. (https://www.turingtree.com/people/silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti is listed as SVP Research & Founding Team at Cognition and as a Keynote speaker at CoreWeave Fully Connected 2026. (https://www.coreweave.com/fully-connected-2026/speakers)
- Silas Alberti presented Cognition's SWE-2 release, which he said matches frontier coding performance at about 60% lower cost on the internal FrontierCode benchmark. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTAjvDT5S9I)
- Alberti said of model evaluations: "We've been burned like this a bunch of times" and "we trust no eval." (https://claude.com/blog/working-at-the-frontier-how-cognition-trusts-claude-fable-5-to-work-through-the-night)
- Alberti described the horizon improvement with Claude Fable 5: "There have been tasks where I was about to go to bed and I was like, 'Okay, just please keep working on this and don't stop until I wake up.' And then I wake up, and it's been working for eight hours straight and actually making real progress. I hadn't seen that before." (https://claude.com/blog/working-at-the-frontier-how-cognition-trusts-claude-fable-5-to-work-through-the-night)
- Silas Alberti posted that more and more teams are switching to Devin, saying "Cloud agents now suddenly making sense as a form factor and engineers appreciate the 2 years of care & curation we've put into building the premier cloud agent experience." (https://x.com/silasalberti/status/2065159748069335364)
- Silas Alberti was named among industry leaders and customers joining the Nebius Customer Advisory Board in 2026. (https://nebiusatlas.com/customers/cognition)
- Silas Alberti is listed as SVP, Research at Cognition and is a speaker at the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Benchmarks event on Thursday, June 11 in San Francisco. (https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2064414063988498624)
- Silas Alberti posted on X that Windsurf is back, writing verbatim: "Windsurf is back! It's only day 4 of Cognition x Windsurf and the team keeps shipping new features. Yesterday bringing Anthropic back, today Wave 11. Lots more in the works, stay tuned!" (https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1945923602148425829)
- Silas Alberti (@silasalberti) posted on X about the Devin Wiki, saying "The Devin Wiki is super impressive! Devin internally maps out your entire codebase and understands the high-level systems." (https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1905424306689245219)
- Silas Alberti built PIGEON with Michal Skreta and Lukas Haas for the Stanford class Computer Science 330, Deep Multi-task and Meta Learning. (https://www.kqed.org/news/11970442/stanford-students-develop-ai-that-can-pinpoint-your-photo-locations)
- Silas Alberti co-authored the PIGEON paper, which estimates where photos were taken from visual clues. (https://www.turingtree.com/people/silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti won the 2. Preis (second prize) at the Bundesfinale of the Deutsche Mathematikolympiade held in Jena from 12 to 15 June 2016. (https://www.land.nrw/pressemitteilung/deutsche-mathematikolympiade-schuelerinnen-und-schueler-aus-nrw-unter-den-besten)
- Silas Alberti built ChatBCG, described as the world's first generative AI for slide decks, with 500k+ registered users. (https://sil.as/)
- Silas Alberti built PIGEON, described as the world's first superhuman AI in the game GeoGuessr and the first AI to beat pro player Rainbolt, with a paper on Arxiv (arxiv.org/abs/2307.05845). (https://sil.as/)
- Silas Alberti is guest lecturing in Week 6 of Mihail Eric's Stanford course The Modern Software Developer, a week focused on agentic code review. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mihaileric_silas-alberti-the-chief-research-officer-activity-7520908687671177216-EzwU)
- Silas Alberti described Cognition's product suite: "Our product is called Devon and it's a product suite for the entire software development life cycle." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTAjvDT5S9I)
- Silas Alberti said a year earlier the research team was "maybe like two or three interns" with little compute, and the first project was Kevin-32B, trained with RL on 16 H200 GPUs to optimize CUDA kernels. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTAjvDT5S9I)
- Silas Alberti is affiliated with Cognition, as indicated by the video title 'Cerebras Supernova: Silas Alberti (Cognition) on Why Cloud Agents Are Finally Ready'. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSu4TbzJGAs)
- Silas Alberti sat down with Modal Labs' Head of Inference, Richard Gong, for a wide-ranging conversation on RL, inference, and the infrastructure work their two teams share. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/modal-labs_our-head-of-inference-richard-gong-sat-activity-7488353409738321920-atQS)
- Alberti's team has run nearly every Claude generation since the start, and he traces the first real jump to Claude 3.6 Sonnet in late 2024, after which internal Devin usage tripled. (https://claude.com/blog/working-at-the-frontier-how-cognition-trusts-claude-fable-5-to-work-through-the-night)
- Alberti calls Frontier Code, a benchmark Cognition built, an "anti-slop" standard, on whose hardest subset the prior Opus model scored around 10% while Claude Fable 5 scored about 30%. (https://claude.com/blog/working-at-the-frontier-how-cognition-trusts-claude-fable-5-to-work-through-the-night)
- Silas Alberti is associated with Devin, describing it as a cloud agent his team has spent 2 years of care and curation building into the premier cloud agent experience. (https://x.com/silasalberti/status/2065159748069335364)
- Savita Raina named Cognition's Silas Alberti among industry leaders and customers joining the Nebius Customer Advisory Board. (https://nebiusatlas.com/customers/cognition)
- Silas Alberti is associated with Cognition, which acquired or partnered with Windsurf (referred to as "Cognition x Windsurf"). (https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1945923602148425829)
- Silas Alberti stated that after Cognition's human engineers kept using the internal codebase-mapping capability, the team decided to expose it in the product, writing "After our (human) engineers kept using it, we decided to expose it in the product." (https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1905424306689245219)
- Silas Alberti (@silasalberti) posted on X about Devin, stating that a new update to Devin caused internal usage to be more than double the previous record. (https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1778623317651706237)
- Silas Alberti wrote that for the first time Devin was the biggest contributor to the Devin repository. (https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1778623317651706237)
- Silas Alberti said: "We created our own dataset of around 500,000 street view images" and "That's actually not that much data, [and] we were able to get quite spectacular performance." (https://www.kqed.org/news/11970442/stanford-students-develop-ai-that-can-pinpoint-your-photo-locations)
- Silas Alberti said of the PIGEON match against Trevor Rainbolt: "We weren't the first AI that played against Rainbolt" and "We're just the first AI that won against Rainbolt." (https://www.kqed.org/news/11970442/stanford-students-develop-ai-that-can-pinpoint-your-photo-locations)
- At the time of the 2016 Deutsche Mathematikolympiade, Silas Alberti was in Klasse 9 at the Vestisches Gymnasium in Kirchhellen. (https://www.land.nrw/pressemitteilung/deutsche-mathematikolympiade-schuelerinnen-und-schueler-aus-nrw-unter-den-besten)
- Public headline says "Chief Research Officer & Founding Team @ Cognition | prev: AI PhD @ Stanford, DeepMind, Jane Street". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/silasalberti)
- Silas Alberti was formerly a student researcher at Google DeepMind. (https://sil.as/)
- Silas Alberti earned a B.Sc. in Mathematics as valedictorian at LMU Munich. (https://sil.as/)
- Silas Alberti is a Stanford-trained AI researcher. (https://www.aicouncil.com/speakers/silas-alberti)
- Before joining Cognition, Silas Alberti worked at Google DeepMind. (https://www.aicouncil.com/speakers/silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti develops AI that can carry out software-engineering tasks. (https://www.turingtree.com/people/silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti co-founded the slide-generation project ChatBCG. (https://www.alphaxiv.org/@silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti developed PIGEON, an image geolocalization system. (https://www.alphaxiv.org/@silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti said of DeepWiki: "you might know us also for deep wiki which is one of our like free products where you can ask question about any codebase on GitHub." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTAjvDT5S9I)
- Silas Alberti described SWE-grep as a fast codebase search model trained on a verifiable file-finding task, served at 2,600 tokens per second. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTAjvDT5S9I)
- Silas Alberti said Cognition factored RSA-260 on idle GPUs for about 10x less than the previous state of the art. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTAjvDT5S9I)
- Silas Alberti gave a talk titled 'Why Cloud Agents Are Finally Ready' as part of Cerebras Supernova. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSu4TbzJGAs)
- The conversation between Silas Alberti and Richard Gong covered training frontier coding models and running inference at scale. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/modal-labs_our-head-of-inference-richard-gong-sat-activity-7488353409738321920-atQS)
- Alberti reacted to the benchmark jump with suspicion, saying "Is there a bug? This can't be true." and later "It was kind of a shocker, honestly." (https://claude.com/blog/working-at-the-frontier-how-cognition-trusts-claude-fable-5-to-work-through-the-night)
- Alberti said Claude Fable 5 makes Cognition's founding bet of cloud agents running for hours viable, and predicted that in a year or two 90% of agent sessions will be proactive ones. (https://claude.com/blog/working-at-the-frontier-how-cognition-trusts-claude-fable-5-to-work-through-the-night)
- Silas Alberti is scheduled to give a talk at the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Benchmarks event hosted at Kernel Labs. (https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2064414063988498624)
- Silas Alberti credited the Devin Wiki as being "Built by @que_tourist and @stevenkplus1 (and many others contributed)!" (https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1905424306689245219)
- Silas Alberti co-authored "Simple linear attention language models balance the recall-throughput tradeoff" with Simran Arora, Sabri Eyuboglu, Michael Zhang, Aman Timalsina and others. (https://www.alphaxiv.org/@silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti investigated the insufficiency of black-box access for auditing LLMs, co-authoring the paper "Black-Box Access is Insufficient for Rigorous AI Audits" with Stephen Casper, Carson Ezell, Charlotte Siegmann, Noam Kolt and others. (https://www.alphaxiv.org/@silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti said of GeoGuessr: "It has YouTubers, Twitch streamers, pro players." (https://www.kqed.org/news/11970442/stanford-students-develop-ai-that-can-pinpoint-your-photo-locations)
- Silas Alberti and his teammates started PIGEON from OpenAI's CLIP image-analysis system and trained it on Google Street View images. (https://www.kqed.org/news/11970442/stanford-students-develop-ai-that-can-pinpoint-your-photo-locations)
- The PIGEON system built by Silas Alberti and his teammates guesses the correct country 95% of the time and can usually pick a location within about 25 miles of the actual site. (https://www.kqed.org/news/11970442/stanford-students-develop-ai-that-can-pinpoint-your-photo-locations)
- Silas Alberti was part of the Cofactory team, which was described as building the future of value creation in an AI-based economy. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chappyasel_life-update-late-last-month-i-left-apple-activity-7131733688677007360-bmOH)
- Silas Alberti was named alongside Benjamin Spector as a co-leader of Cofactory, a company whose name is a portmanteau of "company factory." (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chappyasel_life-update-late-last-month-i-left-apple-activity-7131733688677007360-bmOH)
- Silas Alberti announced he was excited to be part of AI Grant with Cofactory and @spectorb, writing "Excited to be part of AI Grant with Cofactory and @spectorb". (https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1700943683452047668)
- Silas Alberti was one of ten of the 14 participating pupils from NRW to win a prize at the 2016 Bundesfinale of the Deutsche Mathematikolympiade. (https://www.land.nrw/pressemitteilung/deutsche-mathematikolympiade-schuelerinnen-und-schueler-aus-nrw-unter-den-besten)
- Silas Alberti was formerly a quant trading intern at Jane Street. (https://sil.as/)
- Silas Alberti researched deep learning theory, studying the effects of inductive biases on generalization of neural networks and kernel methods, advised by Prof. Song Mei at UC Berkeley. (https://silasalberti.com/research/)
- Silas Alberti developed Local Capsule Hierarchies, a new architecture for learning deformable part-whole hierarchies, in collaboration with Domas Buracas and Nitish Dashora from Machine Learning at Berkeley, advised by Prof. Bruno Olshausen. (https://silasalberti.com/research/)
- Silas Alberti worked on Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, developing a new benchmark and studying new architectures for letting Graph Neural Networks detect directionality, advised by Prof. Gitta Kutyniok and Dr. Ron Levie. (https://silasalberti.com/research/)
- Before joining Cognition, Silas Alberti worked at Jane Street. (https://www.aicouncil.com/speakers/silas-alberti)
- Before joining Cognition, Silas Alberti worked on his own startups. (https://www.aicouncil.com/speakers/silas-alberti)
- The guest lecture by Silas Alberti at Stanford is scheduled for Thursday at Stanford (STLC 000) from 4:30-5:50pm. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mihaileric_silas-alberti-the-chief-research-officer-activity-7520908687671177216-EzwU)
- Silas Alberti's education includes Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Stanford University. (https://www.turingtree.com/people/silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti developed Kevin, which applies multi-turn RL to CUDA kernel generation. (https://www.alphaxiv.org/@silas-alberti)
- Silas Alberti said SWE-2 at medium effort uses 58% fewer turns than the previous model SWE-1.7. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTAjvDT5S9I)
- Silas Alberti was added to Turing Tree as a new person on October 31, 2026, described as Cognition's Chief Research Officer and founding-team member. (https://www.turingtree.com/people/silas-alberti)
- Alberti said "A lot of these things we've always wanted to build at the company are now possible." (https://claude.com/blog/working-at-the-frontier-how-cognition-trusts-claude-fable-5-to-work-through-the-night)
- Silas Alberti highlighted that Windsurf shipped Wave 11, described by @devindevelopers as "Seven big upgrades to Windsurf." (https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1945923602148425829)
- Silas Alberti and his teammates were described as big players of the Swedish geolocation game GeoGuessr during the project. (https://www.kqed.org/news/11970442/stanford-students-develop-ai-that-can-pinpoint-your-photo-locations)
- Previous roles include SVP, Research at Cognition; Founding Team at Cognition; Student Researcher at Google DeepMind; Co-founder at Cofactory; Quant Trading Intern at Jane Street; Full Stack Engineer at fulfin - financing ecommerce; Undergraduate Researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; Machine Learning Researcher at Machine Learning at Berkeley. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/silasalberti)
- Cognition's valuation rose from $26B to $48B in four months, according to the post. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mihaileric_silas-alberti-the-chief-research-officer-activity-7520908687671177216-EzwU)
- Silas Alberti was previously a student researcher at Google DeepMind (Oct 2023 – Mar 2024) and a quant trading intern at Jane Street (Jul 2022 – Sep 2022), and holds a BS in Mathematics from LMU Munich. (https://www.alphaxiv.org/@silas-alberti)
- The conversation highlighted DFlash, Modal's diffusion-based speculator for production serving, and how it stacks up against the previous state of the art, Eagle 3. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/modal-labs_our-head-of-inference-richard-gong-sat-activity-7488353409738321920-atQS)
- Cognition CEO Scott Wu joined a panel on the challenges enterprises face in scaling AI alongside Nebius VP of Product Narek T at Nebius Inflection 2026. (https://nebiusatlas.com/customers/cognition)
- Silas Alberti noted that Windsurf brought Anthropic back the day before his post. (https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1945923602148425829)
- As of November 2023, Cofactory was in stealth mode while scaling rapidly and looking to hire world-class talent. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chappyasel_life-update-late-last-month-i-left-apple-activity-7131733688677007360-bmOH)
- Silas Alberti's Chief Research Officer title and leadership of coding-model research including SWE-2 are cited to a Stanford guest lecture announcement by mihail_eric on x.com. (https://www.turingtree.com/people/silas-alberti)
- Location is San Francisco, California, United States. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/silasalberti)

## Experience
- Chief Research Officer at Cognition (Oct 2026 - Present)
- SVP, Research at Cognition (Apr 2026 - Oct 2026)
- Founding Team at Cognition (Mar 2024 - Apr 2026)
- Student Researcher at Google DeepMind - Mountain View, California, United States (Oct 2023 - Mar 2024): LLMs
- Co-founder at Cofactory (Jun 2023 - Sep 2023): Part of AI Grant Batch 2
- Quant Trading Intern at Jane Street - London, United Kingdom (Jul 2022 - Sep 2022): Received full-time return offer
- Full Stack Engineer at fulfin - financing ecommerce - Munich, Bavaria, Germany (Nov 2019 - Jun 2022)
- Undergraduate Researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München - Munich, Bavaria, Germany (Apr 2021 - May 2022): Mathematics of AI, Graph Neural Networks
- Machine Learning Researcher at Machine Learning at Berkeley - Berkeley, California, United States (Sep 2021 - Jan 2022)
- Research Assistant at Hochschule Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences - Bottrop, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany (Sep 2015 - Oct 2015)

## Education
- Stanford University - Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Artificial Intelligence - (Sep 2022 - Jan 2024): on leave, co-advised by Stefano Ermon & Chris Re
- University of California, Berkeley - Visiting Student, Mathematics - (Jan 2021 - Jan 2021)
- Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München - Bachelor's degree, Mathematics - (Jan 2019 - Jan 2022)
- Jugend trainiert Mathematik - Elite Math Coaching Program, Olympiad Mathematics - (Jan 2014 - Jan 2018): Participated successfully at several Math competitions, e.g. silver medal at Federal Finals of German National Math Olympiad

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/silasalberti
- https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1905424306689245219
- https://www.alphaxiv.org/@silas-alberti
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mihaileric_silas-alberti-the-chief-research-officer-activity-7520908687671177216-EzwU
- https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2064414063988498624
- https://silasalberti.com/research/
- https://www.coreweave.com/fully-connected-2026/speakers
- https://sil.as/
- https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1945923602148425829
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/modal-labs_our-head-of-inference-richard-gong-sat-activity-7488353409738321920-atQS
- https://www.kqed.org/news/11970442/stanford-students-develop-ai-that-can-pinpoint-your-photo-locations
- https://www.land.nrw/pressemitteilung/deutsche-mathematikolympiade-schuelerinnen-und-schueler-aus-nrw-unter-den-besten
- https://claude.com/blog/working-at-the-frontier-how-cognition-trusts-claude-fable-5-to-work-through-the-night
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0elJ0DQj6w
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chappyasel_life-update-late-last-month-i-left-apple-activity-7131733688677007360-bmOH
- https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1778623317651706237
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSu4TbzJGAs
- https://nebiusatlas.com/customers/cognition
- https://www.turingtree.com/people/silas-alberti
- https://www.aicouncil.com/speakers/silas-alberti
- https://x.com/silasalberti/status/2065159748069335364
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTAjvDT5S9I
- https://x.com/silasalberti/status/1700943683452047668
- https://github.com/silasalberti
- https://x.com/silasalberti
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/cognition-ai-labs/posts
- https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/openai-for-startups/posts
- https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-5
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX4-e25xQhg


Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-11-04. Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people/silas-alberti · Everyone at Cognition: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people