“Dear President Trump: America must win the AI war,” ran a full-page advertisement in The Washington Post on the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Its author was Alexandr Wang – the billionaire “wunderkind” behind the start-up Scale AI and an accomplished networker.
Last month, his connections came to fruition when Wang, 28, became one of the most expensive “acqui-hires” in history after Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, invested $15 billion in his business and brought him into the fold to lead Meta’s new “superintelligence” division, says The Telegraph.
The deal is the company’s biggest since buying WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014. Zuckerberg is betting that Wang can provide what Meta needs to catch up with rivals in the race to develop and commercialise AI – and, in particular, achieve the holy grail of becoming the first to develop systems that surpass human intelligence. Paying up for a 49% stake in Scale was “basically incidental”, one investor told the Financial Times. The real prize was Wang, who Zuckerberg had decided was the ideal “wartime CEO” to lead his push.
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The two men have plenty in common; not least the fact that they have both in their time achieved the accolade of becoming the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. Wang has long “idolised” Zuckerberg and in recent months the pair have become close, spending time at the Meta boss’s houses in Tahoe and Palo Alto, California. He may even have had a hand in Zuckerberg’s conversion to a more muscular management style – having himself ditched diversity, equity and inclusion policies at Scale last year to focus on a “MEI” (“merit, excellence and intelligence”) hiring policy, notes Bloomberg. Zuckerberg has even “rearranged the desks” at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters to seat Wang and other top AI talent as close to himself as possible.
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When Wang was born in 1997, his Chinese immigrant parents named him Alexandr – missing out the final e because they wanted to give him the “numerologically lucky” benefits of an eight-letter name. But these were no ordinary immigrants, says Entrepreneur. Both his parents were physicists who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where Robert Oppenheimer’s team had earlier developed the atomic bomb. They were “brilliant scientists” who “accomplished a lot in advancing their field”, Wang observed in a 2022 TED talk. From an early age, “I wanted to work on something as impactful, or even more impactful than that”. A maths prodigy, he finished high school early and enrolled at MIT. But he itched to start his own company and dropped out of college to move to San Francisco. He reassured his parents he would resume his studies – “a little white lie”.
In 2016, Wang started Scale AI with Lucy Guo – a fellow college drop-out. Their idea of starting a company “to label and manage the data that companies use to train AI models” may not have seemed particularly exciting, but their services were soon in demand. Exploiting this niche made Wang the world’s youngest billionaire by 2021 – and it also opened the doors to a welter of high-powered players across Silicon Valley, says the Financial Times. “There are very few companies that have deep relationships with every top AI research team” apart from Scale and Nvidia, notes venture capitalist Dan Levine of Accel, an early investor.
Wang’s arrival has had something of a “halo effect” at Meta. Zuckerberg – who plans to spend hundreds of billions on two gigantic data centres dubbed Prometheus and Hyperion – has been continuing his recruitment blitz of top talent as Meta reinvents itself as an AI titan, says Bloomberg. Key to it all is Alexandr Wang.
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