The 28-year-old wunderkind Zuckerberg is betting $15bn on
'Dear President Trump: America must win the AI war,' an eye-catching full-page advert in The Washington Post declared earlier this year.
The white-on-black statement, published a day after the president's inauguration, was the handiwork of Alexandr Wang, a 28-year-old billionaire and new AI wunderkind behind the start-up Scale AI.
While not as well-known as OpenAI, the business behind ChatGPT, Wang's Scale AI has emerged as one of the hottest artificial intelligence (AI) groups in Silicon Valley and made Wang the new star of the US tech scene.
…and I am confident that under President Trump's administration, we will do just that. pic.twitter.com/pAjQgcmQpk
— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) January 21, 2025
Wang, whose youth masks his skills as a savvy operator and networker, is starting to make his mark on the global stage, receiving an invite to attend Donald Trump's swearing-in on Jan 20 and meeting Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Narendra Modi, India's prime minister, to discuss the future of AI.
Now he has been courted by US tech royalty, namely Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, who has invested $15bn (£11bn) in Wang's business and brought him into Meta to lead a new 'super-intelligence' team.
Scale AI said in a blog post on Friday that Wang would be leaving to join Meta full-time.
$3bn wunderkind
Born to Chinese immigrant parents in New Mexico, Wang co-founded Scale AI in 2016 alongside Lucy Guo, now the world's youngest self-made female billionaire who recently told The Telegraph about the struggles of starting the company.
The business provides complex tech services – namely data labelling and AI evaluation – to other technology companies. Accessing vast amounts of high-quality data is increasingly seen as crucial to improving AI technology.
Exploiting this niche made Wang the world's youngest billionaire in 2021, aged just 24. His net worth is currently estimated at more than $3bn.
Scale AI has been so successful because it uses technology and people to help mark-up and review images, videos or text that are used by other AI labs to develop their latest algorithms.
It also provides a type of 'training' for AI algorithms, known as 'reinforcement learning with human feedback', which it sells to other labs, where human workers help optimise responses from chatbots or other AI tools.
Increasingly, Scale AI has turned to expert contractors who can help chatbots learn advanced coding, maths or chemistry. The business says it has access to 100,000 expert freelancers, to whom it has paid $500m in total.
Simon Proffitt, at UK AI business faculty, says: 'To really make AI models useful you have to have some really high-quality human feedback on the outputs.
'Scale AI offers the platform and the people to systematically fine-tune these models.'
'Super-intelligence' team
Wang was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1997 to highly educated parents who both worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the site of the Manhattan Project during the Second World War, where scientists under Robert Oppenheimer designed the atomic bomb.
According to his LinkedIn page, Wang was selected for the US Mathematics Olympiad programme and was a member of the national Physics Olympiad team in 2014.
After briefly attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study maths and computer science, he dropped out, working in tech before founding Scale AI in 2016.
His start-up has so far raised more than $1.6bn from investors, including Silicon Valley royalty such as Kevin Systrom, the Instagram co-founder, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and OpenAI 's Greg Brockman. Its last funding round included investors such as Amazon, Intel, Qualcomm and Meta.
Now, Zuckerberg is tightening his hold on Scale AI as part of an effort to revive Meta's AI ambitions.
Zuckerberg has made no secret of his goal to turn his social media empire into a company focused on so-called 'artificial general intelligence'. But while Meta has enjoyed some success with its Llama AI model, it has been playing catch-up to OpenAI.
Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Meta had delayed the release of its 'Behemoth' AI model over concerns that its progress had stalled.
A frustrated Zuckerberg has now turned to Wang to lead his new 'super-intelligence' team at Meta and shake up its efforts.
In an unusual deal, Meta will take a 49pc stake in the Scale AI, which will remain independent, but hand all voting control to Wang, giving the founder total authority over the start-up while he moonlights with Zuckerberg.
The deal will be Meta's largest since it acquired WhatsApp for $19bn in 2014.
Wang said the deal 'recognises Scale's accomplishments to date and reaffirms that our path forward – like that of AI – is limitless.'
Zuckerberg has reportedly taken direct oversight of the company's AI programme, personally negotiating with top researchers to join his new team. He has even rearranged the desks at Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park to seat the company's top AI talent near him, Bloomberg reported.
Meta's investment in Scale AI will almost certainly attract scrutiny, even if it falls short of a full takeover.
Microsoft's $13bn investment in OpenAI, or Google's deal to hire senior executives from Character AI, have all faced questions as to whether they effectively amount to acquisitions by stealth.
Since the start of the year, Wang has been an increasingly vocal supporter of the Trump White House. In particular, he has hammered home the message that the US is in a race to build advanced AI against China.
In an open letter in January, Wang wrote to Trump: 'You have the right team in place to take on this challenge and ensure we maintain our lead against adversaries.
'Scale stands ready to be a partner to you and the administration so that America wins the AI war.'
With Wang onside, Zuckerberg will be hoping to keep Meta on the front line in the battle to reach super-intelligence.
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