| Alexandr Wang | |
| Founder of Scale AI | |
| Education: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (dropped out) |
| Birth Place: | Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States |
Alexandr Wang (born January 19, 1997) is the founder and CEO of Scale AI, a data annotation platform that provides training data for machine learning models.[1] [2] At age 24, he became the youngest self-made billionaire in the world.[3] [4] [5] According to Forbes, he is currently worth $2 billion, as of July 2024.
Wang was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He was the son of Chinese immigrants who worked as physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where nuclear weapons were first developed.[6] Wang was passionate about math and computer programming since childhood. He qualified for the Math Olympiad Program in 2013, the USA Physics Team in 2014, and was a USACO finalist in 2012 and 2013. During his teens, Wang worked for Quora as a software programmer.[7] He studied computer science and mathematics at MIT, but then dropped out to co-found Scale AI in 2016.[8]
In 2016 Wang founded Scale AI, which annotates the data used to train artificial intelligence software in computer vision and audio transcription. The company's board of directors includes Plaid co-founder William Hockey. Michael Kratsios, Chief Technology Officer under the Trump administration, joined in May 2021 as managing director and head of strategy, while former Amazon executive Jeff Wilke serves as an advisor to Wang.[9] Scale AI's customers in the commercial sector include Etsy, General Motors, OpenAI, PayPal, Pinterest, Samsung, Toyota, and Uber.[10] In 2021 its valuation hit $7.3 billion, briefly giving Wang a $1 billion net worth as he owned 15% of the company.[11] Scale AI has received defense contracts from the United States Armed Forces[12] [13] and been tapped by the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office to test and evaluate the safety and reliability of large language models for military planning and decision-making.[14]
Scale AI operates a platform called Remotask, which hires some 240,000 data labelers in Africa and Southeast Asia at an affordable rate, sometimes less than $1 an hour. Annotation of training data is necessary for AI systems not to produce too many low-quality results. In the Philippines, many of its hires are freelance contractors not covered under labor laws. The pay for some annotation tasks dropped to less than one cent due to "vicious competition" after Remotask expanded to India as well as Venezuela. Late payments are reportedly "commonplace", and some workers received only a few percent of their promised compensation. In 2022, a University of Oxford study said Remotasks met the "minimum standards of fair work" in only two out of ten criteria. Scale AI has positioned Remotask as a separate brand and said it is committed to paying "a living wage." Remotask's terms and conditions says it can withhold payment or deactivate the accounts of freelancers whose work are deemed inaccurate.
In 2021, Wang was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in the Enterprise Technology category.[15] He was also named to the Time 100 Next and Time100 AI list, which recognizes emerging leaders who are shaping the future of their fields.