Russell Kaplan
Russell Kaplan is an engineering leader in artificial intelligence who previously served as director of engineering at Scale AI and is now president of Cognition, the developer of the AI software engineering agent Devin.
Contents4 sections
Key facts
April 2017Publishing a Paper on Natural-Language-Guided Reinforcement Learning
In April 2017, he and Christopher Sauer and Alexander Sosa, listing Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science as their affiliation, submitted a paper to arXiv presenting a deep reinforcement learning agent that learns to play Atari games with the help of natural language instructions; the paper notes that the three authors contributed equally.[1]
July 14, 2025Announcing the Windsurf Acquisition as President of Cognition
An author page on Scale AI’s website lists his title as director of engineering (without giving dates).[2]
On July 14, 2025, TechCrunch, reporting on Cognition’s acquisition of Windsurf’s intellectual property, product and part of its staff, described him as Cognition’s president and cited his post on X, in which he said the deal went from a first call on Friday evening to a signed definitive agreement on Monday morning over a single weekend.[3]
Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts
Stanford University: Official website: https://www.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)[1]
Scale AI: Official website: https://scale.com/ (opens in a new window)[2]
Cognition: Official website: https://cognition.com/ (opens in a new window)[3]
X: Public account: https://x.com/russelljkaplan (opens in a new window)[3]