Meta's $14.3 Billion Bet: Alexandr Wang Joins 'Superintelligence' Team in AI Race

Scale AI's Wang Brings Meta Knowledge of What Everyone Else is Doing

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 $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 $5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. What Meta is buying: the one guy who knows what everyone else in the AI industry is doing.

The rise of Alexandr Wang: Meta's $14bn bet on 28-year-old Scale AI chief

Mark Zuckerberg is betting more than $14bn that a well-connected 28-year-old is the catalyst his company needs to catch up with rivals racing to develop and commercialise artificial intelligence. The Meta chief struck a deal last week to buy 49 per cent of data labelling business Scale AI and hire its leader Alexandr Wang. Zuckerberg paid $14.3bn, marginally ahead of Scale's last valuation. But ownership of the start-up is "basically incidental", according to one Scale investor. The real prize was Wang. An executive at one of Meta's biggest rivals said the move came after Zuckerberg decided Wang was the "wartime CEO" he needed at the centre of the Big Tech group's "superintelligence" lab -- at a time when Meta was falling behind its AI rivals. A maths prodigy and the child of two Chinese physicists, Wang, who co-founded Scale aged 19, is neither a celebrated AI researcher nor a top engineer. According to a dozen people who have worked with and for Wang, or invested in Scale, he is a highly effective operator who has close connections across Silicon Valley. "There are very few companies that have deep relationships with every top research team: there's Scale and Nvidia, and [Nvidia boss] Jensen [Huang] probably wouldn't take the job," said Dan Levine, a partner at venture capital firm Accel who was one of the first investors in Scale and remains on the company's board. Zuckerberg is hoping that Wang's star power will draw away the best talent from rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Safe Superintelligence (SSI) -- the start-up headed by ex-OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Meta is in talks to hire Dan Gross, one of SSI's co-founders, and his investing partner Nat Friedman, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The discussions, which were first reported by The Information, are at an advanced stage and poaching the pair would represent a coup for Meta's revamped AI division. Gross and Friedman did not respond to a request for comment. Wang's real gift, according to multiple people who have worked with him, is an ability to cultivate powerful allies both within Silicon Valley and beyond. His social calendar has interspersed meetings with world leaders including Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Narendra Modi, alongside trips to New York's Met Gala and Formula 1 races. His confidantes include OpenAI chief and one time housemate Sam Altman, the ChatGPT maker's former chief technology officer Mira Murati, and Michael Kratsios, President Donald Trump's technology adviser. Wang has long idolised Zuckerberg, according to someone familiar with the matter, adding that Scale had sought venture funding from Accel in part because it was an early Facebook investor. For staff at Scale -- who have joked internally that the company would take years to go public because of its high valuation -- the deal represents a welcome windfall. Staff in Meta's generative AI team are less impressed, according to a person close to the company, citing doubts over Wang's technical prowess. Meta is far from a neutral broker in the AI race, and Wang's ability to pull in favours might be shortlived. His new post puts him in a war for talent against the likes of Altman and Murati, who founded her own AI start-up called Thinking Machines last year. Altman said this week that Meta had attempted to poach OpenAI developers with the promise of $100mn sign-on bonuses and even higher pay. The massive outlay on new employees is an admission that Meta's existing AI strategy was stuttering. The company's latest release, Llama 4, underwhelmed on a number of independent performance benchmarks. Wang's title, and his relation to Yann LeCun -- the computer scientist who leads Meta's fundamental AI research efforts -- has not yet been determined, according to the company. "This is the great bet: the most important thing short term is the research team they assemble quickly," said someone close to Scale. "They're making incredible offers and are trying to hire a talented team as soon as possible. Alex knows all of these people . . . Its almost like a heist." Others who know Wang see opportunism behind the relentless network building. "Wang is an operator, he wants to make as much money as possible and make as big a name for himself as possible," said one former employee. "He wants his name on everything, even when he isn't across it or hasn't done the work," said another person who has worked closely with Wang on a number of projects. Scale contested that characterisation, describing Wang as hard working and conscientious. At Scale, Wang proved adept at reading the market and political winds. The start-up initially focused on serving companies training autonomous vehicles, before pivoting in 2019 to focus more on artificial intelligence. It quickly became the most prominent of a group of companies doing the unglamorous work of labelling and categorising data used to train AI tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. That has involved hiring more than 100,000 "gig" workers, many in the developing world, via a subsidiary called Remotasks. It has more recently used subject experts to train and test models in highly specialised domains. Scale said most of the company's "contributors" are now based in the US. Scale has pursued new business with the US government and helped companies build AI applications. That business is growing fast, according to a person close to Scale, but the bulk of its $870mn in revenue last year came from labelling data for the biggest generative AI companies, including Meta. "Alex is never happy with his team, never happy with himself. When I met him as a 19-year-old I noticed his intelligence, but missed his relentless drive," said one early investor in Scale. Wang has also become a trusted messenger in Washington DC thanks to his adroit policy stances, such as extreme hawkishness on China and an advocacy for "merit-based" hiring over diversity. Scale's fate is now unclear. New chief executive Jason Droege said the Meta deal, which valued Scale at $29bn, validated the company's approach and was "not a pivot or a winding down." "We have an exceptional team, a clear vision, and the resources to achieve truly remarkable things," he said. In the near-term issue Scale is fighting to retain its biggest customers, and reassure them that their data will be ringfenced from Meta. OpenAI and Google have already signalled they will wean off Scale's services. "Scale's business is going to collapse, no one wants to work with a company Meta owns 49 per cent of, so [Meta] had to pay what investors valued the entire company at in the last round," said one of the start-up's backers. Scale said the company's relationships with key customers remains strong, adding that Meta's investment indicates there is real value in the remaining business. OpenAI said the company had been in the process of moving off Scale for the last few months. Google declined to comment. Someone close to the company was more bullish about Scale's future without Wang. "Our customers can't really leave us," the person said. "We're in a war and [Scale is] the arms dealer."

Alexandr Wang on AI's Potential and Its 'Deficiencies'

On June 12, Alexandr Wang stepped down as Scale's CEO to chase his most ambitious moonshot yet: building smarter-than-human AI as head of Meta's new "superintelligence" division. As part of his move, Meta will invest $14.3 billion for a minority stake in Scale AI, but the real prize isn't his company -- it's Wang himself. Wang, 28, is expected to bring a sense of urgency to Meta's AI efforts, which this year have been plagued by delays and underwhelming performance. Once the undisputed leader of open-weight AI, the U.S. tech giant has been overtaken by Chinese rivals like DeepSeek on popular benchmarks. Although Wang, who dropped out of MIT at 19, lacks the academic chops of some of his peers, he offers both insight into the types of data Meta's rivals use to improve their AI systems, and unrivaled ambition. Google and OpenAI are both reportedly severing deals with Scale AI over the Meta deal. Scale declined to comment, but interim CEO has emphasized that the company will continue to operate independently in a blog post.

Inside the rise of Alexandr Wang and Meta's $14 billion bet that the MIT dropout will help bring AI supremacy

Presiding over the confab was Alexandr Wang, the young CEO of data labeling AI startup Scale. Wang's company was eight years old and already worth $13 billion at the time, but the event at the Montage Deer Valley, co-hosted with longtime Scale angel investor Nat Friedman, was clearly intended to signal Wang's status as more than just the latest Silicon Valley wunderkind. Sitting alongside gray-haired Pentagon top brass, the 26-year-old Wang held forth on the U.S.-China AI arms race and other weighty topics. One attendee recalled Wang as a well-spoken master of ceremonies, but with an agenda to sell. "My impression is that [it] was a bit of a sales event to show off to his investors and government customers that he had a fantastic network," he told Fortune. Another attendee said Wang was a "generous" host, but added he was unsettled by the "theatrical hawkishness" -- what he described as a "fairly transparent effort to ingratiate himself with the national security establishment." In an unexpected, dramatic follow-up as attendees flew home from Utah, the day after the event, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was abruptly fired. Within 48 hours, as chaos unfolded inside OpenAI's nonprofit boardroom, Wang and Friedman were both quietly approached to serve as interim CEO. Both declined. By then, however, it was clear: Wang, who was already known in some D.C. circles as Washington's "AI whisperer," had come a long way since co-founding Scale AI in 2016 with Lucy Guo, back when he was a 19-year-old MIT dropout building a data-labeling startup for self-driving cars (to help teach AI systems to know the difference between, say, a blowing plastic bag and a pedestrian). In just a few years, he had transformed Scale into a generative AI powerhouse -- first by hiring tens of thousands of workers to manually sift through and label massive datasets to help train AI models, then to run model evaluations and fine-tune systems for companies like OpenAI, SAP, and Toyota through techniques like reinforcement learning. In 2021, at just 24, he briefly became the youngest self-made billionaire after a funding round which valued the company north of $7 billion. But when news emerged this month that Wang was joining Meta to be part of a new "superintelligence" team reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg, part of a $14.3 billion acqui-hire, industry watchers were still stunned. The deal, which values Scale at $29 billion and Wang's personal stake at a reported $5 billion, is Meta's largest outside investment ever. The stakes couldn't be higher for Meta, as it transitions its business into the rapidly-evolving AI era and races against giants like Google and OpenAI to develop all-powerful AGI and "superintelligence" capabilities. In Wang, and in the 49% stake in Scale that Meta is acquiring, Zuckerberg appears to see a secret weapon. There are even rumors that Wang could be crowned the head of Meta's entire AI operations -- rumors that have only added to the consternation among those wondering how a young entrepreneur whose business relies more on manual labor than large language models fits into Meta's quest for AI supremacy. Fortune spoke to more than more than a dozen people close to Wang, including current and former Scale employees, investors, acquaintances, and competitors, to trace how the 28-year-old MIT dropout built the business at the center of one of the richest deals in the AI boom, and to understand why Meta is betting so much on it. Meta declined to comment or to make Wang available. "Alex is a great recruiter, a really savvy commercial person," said one former Scale manager. "Who knows if it'll work out? Maybe he builds a better AI team into something Herculean, maybe not, but you're gonna bet on someone to do it. There's probably a handful of people in the world that you bet on to do it. I think he's probably one of them." Meta's relationship with Scale dates back to 2019, when the social media company began using Scale as a data provider for its AI efforts. In 2024, when Scale raised $1 billion in its Series F funding round, Meta was among the investors, scooping up half-a-million shares of the startup's stock. Zuckerberg and Wang began spending more time together beginning in April, when Zuckerberg reached out and expressed a desire to work more closely, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. The Meta CEO, who had once also held the title of the world's youngest self-made billionaire, began inviting Wang to pow-wow with him at his houses in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto, with Zuckerberg soon coming to trust Wang's opinion. Advisors say that Zuckerberg would sometimes reference Wang's views in conversations with them, The Information reported. The conversations between two CEOs came at a time when Zuckerberg was growing frustrated with Meta's struggles keeping up with rival AI labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. Meta had succeeded in creating a family of successful open-source AI models, called Llama, but never seemed able to stay in front of the pack for long. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind would inevitably surge past Meta with AI models that captured more attention and mindshare among AI developers. With the release of Llama 4 in April 2025, Meta's malaise became a crisis. Allegations of possibly inflated performance metrics, a rushed release, and a lack of transparency, along with indications that Meta was failing to keep pace with open-source AI rivals like China's DeepSeek, led many in the industry to proclaim Meta's latest AI model a flop. (Meta has called claims that it gamed performance metrics "simply not true," and ascribed reports of Llama 4s "mixed performance" at launch to early bugs). To regain the edge, Meta has moved aggressively to amass AI talent and realign its efforts. News reports this week have claimed Meta recently held talks to acquire AI firm Perplexity, as well as Safe Superintelligence, the startup founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. According to one source familiar with the matter, Meta is currently in talks to acquire the AI venture capital fund managed by Friedman, the Scale investor, and Safe Superintelligence executive Daniel Gross. The discussions with Scale appear to have occurred in parallel to many of Meta's other talks. Wang resisted Zuckerberg's initial proposal that he join Meta, saying that if he were to leave his startup, any deal would have to involve an immediate (and worthwhile) outcome for Scale's investors, according to the source familiar with the negotiations. Throughout May, the two CEOs held on-and-off discussions, going from a proposed $5 billion Meta non-voting investment in Scale to the eventual arrangement of Meta investing $14.3 billion for 49% of Scale in non-voting shares with potential future conversion. (The deal also includes a poison pill provision: If Wang leaves Meta, the shares would convert at a rate of 1.5, creating additional dilution, incentivizing Wang to make a long-term commitment to Meta.) Some sources close to Wang, whose first name is spelled without the second "e" to give it the eight characters associated with good fortune in Chinese culture, said the deal he reached with Zuckerberg shows his commitment to doing right by his investors and employees rather than abandoning them for his own lucrative exit. Still, the news that Wang was leaving came as a big surprise to many people connected to Scale and its CEO. "It was a total shock," said the former Scale AI manager, who left the company last month. "I never thought about the idea of Alex leaving Scale, especially when we'd just announced the tender offer at a $25 billion valuation. I think about how fast it all happened." Scale responded to Fortune's request for comment by pointing to a blog post from new CEO Jason Droege that affirms the company's continued independence, its commitment to not favoring any specific AI models, and hinting at upcoming announcements. After the deal was publicly announced, Wang addressed Scale employees at the company's South of Market office in San Francisco. He got a standing ovation as he walked down a winding staircase to the office building's atrium. He cried at times as he spoke to employees about his time at Scale and starting the company when he was a freshman at college. Perhaps Wang was thinking even further back to his childhood, as the son of immigrant parents who were nuclear physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which had served as the top-secret site for developing the first atomic bombs, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer. "In my town, basically everybody's parents worked for the National Lab," he told Fortune in an interview last year. "Every adult around me was a scientist who had made the pledge to use their scientific capability and their powers for enhancing technologies that would ensure the continued security of the United States." That upbringing provided the template Wang used to make Scale into a successful business, said Jared Friedman, a group partner at Y Combinator. "He built an extremely talent-dense team and intense culture with people similar to him, other exceptional math and CS [computer science] students," Friedman said. Wang, who competed in national math competitions in high school, dropped out of MIT after one year to pursue the startup dream, teaming up with Lucy Guo, a product designer at Quora, who had herself dropped out of Carnegie Mellon to pursue a Thiel Fellowship and had been Snap's first female designer. The duo originally planned to create tech for a doctors' concierge service, but after joining startup accelerator Y Combinator in summer of 2016, they eventually pivoted to data labelling. "They were originally working on completely different ideas and spent most of the first summer just figuring out what to build," recalls Friedman, who served as Wang and Guo's partner at Y Combinator in 2016. Once it pivoted to data labelling, Scale found the perfect customer base in the rapidly-expanding, and well-funded, group of startups working to build self-driving vehicles. Wang embodied the company credo of "Ambition shapes reality," said an early employee who left in 2022. "Alex himself would get deeply involved in customer engagements when needed, including deep-diving into both technical challenges and helping to network and negotiate with higher-ups on the business side to help us win customers and new business." Another source, the former Scale manager, described two-hour-long daily meetings "where we would review every single account." The routine was not universally enjoyed inside the ranks, the person said, "but honestly, in retrospect it forced everyone to be very rigorous." Tensions between the two cofounders soon surfaced as the company grew. Guo had recruited Wang, and she was the original CEO. But the two founders could not get along, clashing over how they each deemed their counterpart was handling their duties, according to a source familiar with the matter. The board sided with Wang, who became CEO, and Guo left the company in 2018, according to this person's account. Guo told Fortune that when Wang proposed taking on the CEO role after the Series A, believing "he'd be better as the face of an API company," she agreed. "I wasn't title centric and was fine with it," she said in an email. Guo told Fortune she had received $750 million as a result of the Meta deal, but did not comment on the current state of her relationship with Wang. In recent years, Scale has run into concerns about its labor practices with the estimated tens of thousands of contractors it employs around the world to manually label data and review images. A Department of Labor investigation was opened in 2024 and closed in May around the company's adherence to the Fair Labor Standards Act, particularly around fair pay and worker classification. There are currently two labor lawsuits against Scale that are ongoing. Glenn Danas, partner at Clarkson Law Firm -- which brought those cases against the company -- estimates the company's contractor workforce could be roughly 60,000 people. One thing that makes the Meta/Scale deal notable is that Wang had always emphasized that he is not a researcher, and that Scale AI was not building AI models. Instead, it wanted to provide the entire generative AI ecosystem with high-quality data to train its models. "We're not out there developing a leading large language model," Wang told Fortune last year. "But we do serve the entire ecosystem. Nearly every major large language model is built on top of our data foundry." Scale was also agnostic when it came to working with customers. It did some of the earliest experiments on reinforcement learning human feedback (RLHF), with OpenAI in 2019, with the team that later became Anthropic. Scale continued collaborating with both AI startups. "We're both neutral across the entire ecosystem and we're able to have very strong relations with every relevant company in the AI ecosystem across the stack," Wang said. Scale has said it will continue to operate as an independent company (with Wang as chairman), serving other customers. Under the terms of the deal, Meta will spend a minimum of $500 million a year for Scale data over the next five years, according to the source familiar with the negotiations. But the perception of neutrality now looks all but dead. Following the announcement, news reports said that both Google and OpenAI were planning to end their relationship with Scale. Some industry observers speculate that Meta's real strategy all along was a data landgrab, a move to secure a major source of one of the vital components for building AI models -- and to deprive others of it. But several industry insiders that Fortune spoke to were skeptical of the theory. Ryan Kolln, CEO of Scale AI competitor Appen, said he doubts the Meta/Scale deal is about consolidating data vendors or starving competitors seeking data. There's a risk in doing that because there's a strong benefit to having diversity in data, with vendors that have different specialties and expertise, he said. So what is the key thing Zuckerberg is getting for his $14.3 billion? Several sources close to the companies said they'd heard that Wang is being considered as a potential leader for Meta's entire AI organization -- a far more powerful remit than the "superintelligence" team, which some news reports have said will consist of 50 people and be helmed by Wang. Erik Meijer, a former engineering leader at Meta, said he would not be surprised by a move to make Wang a "chief AI officer" of all of Meta. "Heaping everything into a single org makes sense," he said. "In fact I would be surprised if Mark [Zuckerberg] would make such a big investment and then not do a full on reorg putting all AI efforts in one place." Meta's sprawling AI kingdom includes the product-focused generative AI team, the AGI Foundations unit focused on further Llama development, as well as FAIR (Fundamental AI Research), which was founded by Yann LeCun, the AI "godfather" who remains Meta's chief scientist. There is also a standalone Business AI product team helmed by former Salesforce AI head Clara Shih. That said, Wang would be an unorthodox choice for the top role, given that he is not a computer scientist. Whether the PhDs and other AI researchers working at Meta would accept Wang as their leader is hardly a sure thing. "Nope," one current Meta AI researcher said flatly. Wang is a businessman without a strong record working with AI models, the Meta researcher said. A former Meta AI researcher who worked in Meta's FAIR group concurred: "He is not going to be accepted easily." It's a warning Zuckerberg may well heed, given that Meta's research lab is already bleeding talent -- 11 of the original 14 Llama authors have left to join competitors. On the other hand, Wang's defenders point out that while not a computer scientist, he is more than capable of getting in the AI weeds. "We forget sometimes he is a very technically-capable guy," said the former Scale manager. "He's not just a salesperson. He's incredible at it, but he's not just a salesperson." With more than $164 billion in annual revenue, Meta knows all too well that it takes something truly unique to move the needle in its business. And in paying up for Wang and Scale, Zuckerberg is likely betting that the real value transcends any simple categories. One source close to Wang told Fortune that the surprise and confusion stems from the fact that Wang does not fit into the typical tech world archetypes. "Silicon Valley is good at putting people into boxes, they like to say, this person is a technical person, this person is a business person," he said. "Alex is truly a man of one." And that kind of asset is especially valuable as the landscape changes. If AI proves as game-changing as some expect, it will be far more consequential than any of the previous platform shifts that have rocked the tech industry, bringing hard-to-predict risks and opportunities. The advent of AI is already thawing the massive military contract market that Silicon Valley companies were once largely frozen out of, with Meta forging ties with drone-maker Anduril while rivals like OpenAI clinch Pentagon deals of their own. "My very, very deep sense is that Meta is actively exploring, maybe even advanced in terms of actively exploring, wanting to play a significant leadership role in the national security of the United States," said one former Department of Defense official. As Wang demonstrated at the Utah confab in 2023, and in Scale's full-page Washington Post ad in January ("Dear President Trump, America must win the AI War"), Meta's new investment is well-positioned on that front. It's also not gone unnoticed that Michael Kratsios, the Trump Administration's director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Science Advisor to the President, worked at Scale in between the two Trump terms. "He's been very smart and extremely clever," the former DoD official said about Wang. "He seemed to lean into something that a lot of people have a little bit of a revulsion against, which is, engage in the politics of Washington. I think Alex, whether it's by generation or personality, or whatever, he really got that that needed to happen - he seemed to have a real sixth sense." But while Meta could use all the help it can get in D.C. ("No one loves to hate anyone more than Washington loves to hate Zuckerberg; it's kind of a pastime for some people," a beltway insider said), Wang will ultimately need to deliver more than the services of a lobbyist for the partnership with Zuckerberg to be successful. To Wang's fans, including one source who has known Wang for about a decade, his versatility will help Meta open doors and navigate whatever challenges lie ahead: "He's better at the point of contact on any problem more than anyone I've ever seen." Zoom out for a longer term view, and this person echoed a common sentiment, that Wang is just getting started. "He may start another company, or maybe a bunch of companies," the person said. "Over time, he has a chance of being a main character in Silicon Valley at the highest levels for the next 30 years."

Alexandr Wang Scales Up: Why Mark Zuckerberg Picked a Founder to Fuel His AI Ambitions

Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old CEO and co-founder of Scale AI, is leaving his position to head up a new unit at Meta dedicated to developing "superintelligence," or an AI that's better than the smartest humans at most, if not all, tasks. Wang's departure comes after Meta's $14 billion investment in Scale AI, part of an announcement last week that sent tremors throughout the AI world. Heading a superintelligence lab might appear like a curious appointment, since Wang isn't a scientist by trade. But the young billionaire is being tapped at an astonishing price tag to help Meta win in the commercial AI race, says a source familiar with the matter who asked for anonymity to protect relationships. Wang is an MIT dropout who is technically-minded, but he is seen more as a savvy business hire than a technical leader for Meta. Meta had planned to announce Wang as the company's new chief AI officer, but ultimately decided against the title, the source says. Both Meta and Scale AI declined to comment. Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winning scientist, is currently Meta's chief AI scientist. Wang is seen internally at Meta as someone who can help make the company's AI business profitable. Crucially, he's viewed as nimble, and able to pivot as the focus of AI changes on a dime from self-driving car technology to generative AI chatbots. LeCun has previously clashed with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg with personal viewpoints that rebuff a lot of the frothiest hype in AI.

Meet Alexandr Wang, the 28-Year-Old Who Went from MIT Dropout to Billionaire Meta Hire: 'I Wanted to Make a Difference'

Here's what to know about Wang and his journey from MIT dropout to the world's youngest self-made billionaire. Alexandr Wang is leaving Scale AI, the startup he founded in 2016 -- that made him the world's youngest self-made billionaire -- to join Meta. Wang, 28, broke the news to employees in a memo that he posted on X on Thursday. Meta is investing $14.3 billion in Scale AI as part of the deal, in exchange for a 49% stake in the startup and access to fresh talent, including Wang. Scale AI's valuation more than doubled from $14 billion to $29 billion due to the investment. "Opportunities of this magnitude often come at a cost," Wang wrote in the memo. "In this instance, that cost is my departure." Wang will join Meta in a top leadership role in a new division that Meta is calling its Superintelligence lab, and transition from being Scale's CEO to serving as a director on its board, according to The New York Times. Jason Droege, who formerly started and led the Uber Eats business at Uber, will step in as Scale AI's interim CEO. Related: Meta Is Reportedly Offering Up to Nine-Figure Pay for Researchers on Its New Superintelligence AI Team Wang was born in New Mexico in 1997 to Chinese immigrant parents who were both employed as physicists for the U.S. Air Force and the military. "My parents were brilliant scientists in Los Alamos who accomplished a lot in advancing their field," Wang said in an April 2022 TED talk. "I wanted to work on something as impactful or even more impactful than that. That's why I decided to become a programmer -- I wanted to make a difference in this world." As a child, Wang excelled at math and began competing in national math and coding competitions in sixth grade, per Forbes. He has been playing violin since the age of nine and taught himself how to code, according to Leader Biography. Related: Goldman Sachs CIO Says Coders Should Take Philosophy Classes -- Here's Why Wang attended Los Alamos High School and graduated a year early. Wang was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and intended to pursue a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science, according to his LinkedIn page. However, before starting at MIT, Wang took a gap year between high school and college and moved to Silicon Valley, and landed a job as an engineer at Q&A site Quora. It was at Quora that Wang met Lucy Guo, a product designer who would go on to be his Scale AI co-founder. The idea for Scale AI came to Wang when he was still an MIT student, he told El País. He wanted to figure out which of his roommates was stealing his food from the shared refrigerator by installing a fridge camera and developing an AI that could process camera footage. Wang was never able to figure out who was stealing his food, simply because of the sheer volume of video footage, but the experiment taught him the importance of data in unlocking AI insights. Related: How to Be a Billionaire By 25, According to a College Dropout Turned CEO Worth $1.6 Billion He started Scale AI with Guo in 2016 at age 19, the summer after his freshman year at MIT, to label and manage data that companies use to train AI models. "To power AI, you need powerful data, which was especially hard to come by at that time, in 2016, when I was at MIT," Wang said in the TED Talk. The team was admitted to the summer 2016 batch of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that has launched companies like Airbnb and Dropbox. Wang became Scale AI's CEO and Guo led its operations and product design teams. Wang dropped out of MIT that summer to pursue the startup, according to VNExpress. In 2018, Guo left Scale AI due to differences in vision with Wang. Wang became a billionaire at age 24 in 2021 thanks to Scale's growth and is now still the world's youngest self-made billionaire at age 28, with a net worth of $3.6 billion. Scale AI now works with the likes of OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft, according to its site. Scale generated about $870 million in revenue in 2024, per Bloomberg. With the Meta investment, the company now plans to "accelerate innovation and strengthen strategic partnerships with customers," according to a press release. Scale will also distribute a portion of the investment to shareholders, with the payout based on how much of the company each investor owns.

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

Alexandr Wang, Scale AI co-founder, secures a massive investment from Meta. Mark Zuckerberg hires Wang to his superintelligence group. Wang's networking skills and industry knowledge are key to the deal. Meta gains leverage over AI rivals like OpenAI and Google. Wang's connections extend to government and right-wing influencers. His journey from math prodigy to AI entrepreneur is remarkable.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 $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 $5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. What Meta is buying: the one guy who knows what everyone else in the 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 people familiar with the matter. Zuckerberg developed a strong admiration for him, the people 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 people 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. 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% 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 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 favor 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 defense 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 socializing. "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 8 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 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're 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 realized 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-labeling 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 labeling data -- for example, looking at imagery from self-driving cars and labeling 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-labeling 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 toward becoming billionaires, Scale worked with thousands of contractors in countries like 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're 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 $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 $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 neighbors 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 toward 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 cozying 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 favor 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.