Scale AI's Alexandr Wang brings to Meta knowledge of what everyone else is doing

Business Times

5 hours ago

[SAN FRANCISCO] Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang is such an enthusiastic networker that his former roommate – OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman – once jokingly told him to tone it down a bit.
Fortunately for Wang, he ignored the advice. Last week, the 28-year-old parlayed his ability to cultivate influential relationships into a US$14.3 billion investment from Meta in Scale, and a new job for himself in Meta's 'superintelligence' group, reporting to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. His own cash and equity in the deal is worth more than US$5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. What Meta is buying: the one guy who knows what everyone else in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is doing.
In recent months, Wang has become close with Zuckerberg and has spent time at the Meta CEO's houses in Tahoe and Palo Alto, California, discussing the future of AI, according to sources familiar with the matter. Zuckerberg developed a strong admiration for him, the sources said.
Wang is also close with Altman, who before OpenAI used to run the elite startup accelerator Y Combinator. Scale went through YC in 2016, and the two men lived together for a period during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to other sources who know the two men.
At first glance, the Wang hiring looks a lot like the other expensive not quite acquisitions by Meta's big tech competitors. Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet have also thrown gargantuan sums at AI researchers with advanced degrees and experience building cutting-edge models, sometimes by inking licensing deals with their companies.
But Wang stands out because he's not an academic nor is he running a prominent AI model maker – he's just really good at knowing what's going on in the industry. His company, Scale, deals with the grunt work of human-powered data collection that's needed to build machine learning models, and most of the important companies have been his customers.
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With the Scale investment, Zuckerberg may gain leverage over some of his biggest AI rivals. Either those companies, including OpenAI and Google, continue to use Scale and help bolster a business Zuckerberg now owns 49 per cent of, or they're forced to go find an alternative to Scale, which may slow their progress. (OpenAI intends to stick with Scale, while Google is reportedly planning to cut ties.)
It's likely Wang also has valuable insights into Zuckerberg's competitors from his time partnering with them over the last several years.
Wang's network and reach extends beyond those firms, too. Since he co-founded Scale at 19, Wang has befriended other founders of billion-dollar startups such as Plaid, Figma and Brex. Wang has also curried favour with right-wing influencers and Republican lawmakers in Washington, in part by hammering concerns about China.
In the process, Scale has racked up increasingly large government contracts. Going forward, those ties could also benefit Meta as it works to break into defence tech.
Wang reaches out directly to keep up relationships with a dizzying number of people, in both junior and senior roles, and knows what they're working on and what they want to be doing, according to a close contact, who declined to be named speaking publicly about Wang. 'He knows everyone' in the AI world, that person said.
Even Altman, an accomplished networker in his own right, teased Wang last year about his incessant need to be socialising. 'This is authoritative, truly no one flies in and out to more parties than you,' Altman tweeted at him. 'It looks like a full-time job.'
'High beta' founder
When Wang was born, in 1997, his Chinese immigrant parents named him Alexandr – missing the final e – because they wanted the numerologically lucky benefits of an eight-letter name, he once explained on a podcast. The number eight is associated with wealth and prosperity in Chinese culture.
Wang's parents were both physicists who worked at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico; Wang inherited their braininess. He won math competitions in grade school, became a nationally ranked mathlete, and studied the violin. 'My sport was math,' he later recounted on a podcast.
He finished high school early and enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but itched to start his own company. Even though his parents and two older brothers all have doctorates, he dropped out of college to move to San Francisco. 'I always wanted to be doing more, or wanted to be accomplishing more,' he said in a video for Forbes. He reassured his parents he was going to go back – 'a little white lie', he said.
In 2016, he teamed up with Lucy Guo, a Thiel Fellow, which means the billionaire Peter Thiel financially backed her choice to quit college because of her brilliance. The pair applied to YC with the idea for a doctor-booking app.
During the 10-minute interview for YC, Wang came across as having a mix of potential and ego, YC partner Jessica Livingston recalled on the accelerator's podcast The Social Radars. 'May be arrogant or brilliant – I think the former,' she wrote in her notes at the time. 'But worth funding.'
Other YC partners described the founder as 'high beta', using an investing term to mean volatility. 'Describing a founder as 'high beta' means they are either going to flame out or take over the world,' YC founder Paul Graham posted about Wang.
Within a few weeks of starting at YC, Wang and Guo realised the doctor-appointment idea was too steep a struggle and decided to pivot to a new idea. Wang had been inspired by recent advancements in machine learning; months earlier, the world's best human Go player had lost to a Go-playing AI. He and Guo decided to sell data-labelling services to other companies who needed to amass training data to feed into AI projects.
Scale initially called itself an 'Uber for AI' because it offered contractors around the world the chance to make money by labelling data – for example, looking at imagery from self-driving cars and labelling obstacles, vehicles, signs and pedestrians. The startup quickly raised from top-tier investors. But two years after founding, the co-founders' relationship turned sour. After a dispute, Wang fired Guo and continued running the startup himself.
AI whisperer
As AI models continued to advance at a dramatic pace, Scale positioned itself as a key provider of the underlying data infrastructure. It was less flashy than building frontier models, but it was a lucrative business selling the work that still needed to be done by humans to the people building models that would replace them.
Scale is not the only provider of data-labelling services, but Wang's star power, network and fundraising prowess helped make it the best known in the field. In the process, Wang and Scale also emerged as lightning rods for criticisms about the unseen workforce behind today's AI services.
As Wang and Guo were on their way towards becoming billionaires, Scale worked with thousands of contractors in countries such as Kenya and the Philippines who were paid relatively little to weed through reams of online data, with some saying they have suffered psychological trauma from the content they are asked to review. In a 2019 interview with Bloomberg, Wang said the company's contract workers earn 'good' pay – 'in the 60th to 70th percentile of wages in their geography'.
Wang also pursued government contracts and impressed lawmakers with youth and confidence. In meetings in Washington, Wang came across as 'authoritative and direct' and made a concerted effort to meet with the Biden administration, said one former Biden staffer. Wang 'almost enjoyed' being underestimated because of his age, said a former Scale employee who accompanied him on trips to the capital.
In 2020, the company landed a US$90 million contract with the Defense Department; in 2022, that expanded to a deal to make its technology available to all federal agencies, under a US$250 million purchase agreement. The outlet Semafor soon dubbed him 'Washington's AI Whisperer'.
As Scale grew, so did Wang's wealth and profile. By 2022, at age 25, Forbes was calling him the youngest self-made billionaire. Scale threw posh private gatherings for the who's-who of AI, like a 2023 conference in the Utah mountains where, in between archery sessions and elevated dining, attendees discussed the threat of China's advancements in AI.
Wang attended the Met Gala and frequently posted selfies hanging out with the Mad Men actress Kiernan Shipka. He spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and was included on Time's 2024 list of the 100 most influential people. (Altman wrote the short blurb about Wang for the magazine's list, calling him a 'longtime friend'.)
Guo, Wang's ousted co-founder, is no longer involved in Scale, but her shares in the company also led Forbes to label her a self-made billionaire this year. She bought a luxury condo in Miami and threw a party with a rented lemur and snake, which provoked ire from her wealthy neighbours and prompted the New York Post to deem her 'Miami's No 1 party girl'.
Courting the manosphere
In the past year, Wang has made overtures towards right-wing personalities and values. In June 2024, he announced that Scale's hiring policy would be based on 'MEI' – 'merit, excellence and intelligence,' a rebuttal to the diversity, equity and inclusion policies that were widely adopted by tech companies in the 2010s and have since been rejected and derided by many conservatives.
In January, Wang attended Trump's inauguration and palled around with right-wing influencers such as the Paul brothers and the Nelk Boys. In one viral clip from the inauguration, comedian Theo Von falls backward and crashes into Logan Paul when his folding chair breaks; Wang and Altman are sitting a few feet away.
After Wang met Von at the inauguration, Von had him as a guest on his popular podcast, one of several prominent shows that helped propel Trump to the White House. Wang, in a camo-print trucker hat with the word 'Godspeed' embroidered across the front, explained to Von the basics of AI and pressed the point that the US risks losing its lead to China. 'Dude, you should be a superhero,' said Von, with awe in his voice. Wang replied, 'Math goes a long way,' to which Von added, 'Oh, hell yeah, dude – divide these nuts.'
Wang has taken warnings about China's AI prowess to more serious forums, too. 'If we as Americans want to defend our way of life, our ideologies, and democracy broadly, it's important for us to stay ahead,' Wang told Bloomberg this winter at Davos.
In January, Scale AI took out a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post stating: 'America must win the AI war.' That message has resonated in Washington as DeepSeek and other Chinese AI startups have released increasingly competitive AI models.
Wang's recent moves echo those of Zuckerberg, who has also been cosying up to Trump. Meta rolled back its diversity efforts and weakened its hate-speech policies. They are starting to act alike in other ways; both Wang and Zuckerberg now sport curly mops of hair and favour streetwear fashion while appearing on right-leaning podcasts (Zuckerberg has been a guest with both Joe Rogan and Von).
The two CEOs share the rare distinction of having both been, at one time or another, the world's youngest self-made billionaire. Now, one of them will be the other's boss. BLOOMBERG