Alexandr Wang, co-founder of Scale AI, briefly became the youngest self-made billionaire at the age of 24.
His company provides artificial intelligence firms with the data they need to train AI algorithms through a massive outsourced workforce that can be found in countries such as Venezuela, Kenya and the Philippines.
Scale AI’s subsidiary, Remotasks, employs over 240,000 individuals who perform simple tasks that are fundamental to AI training, including data labeling. The company’s value is currently at $7.3 billion. It is now poised to take advantage of the latest AI boom, unless someone else can do it better or cheaper, according to Forbes.
During a trip to China, Wang became unsettled when he listened to the brightest engineers discussing AI without mentioning how it might be used. Wang realized that AI could disrupt the current world order, and this led him to focus on Scale AI’s development. He notes that the history of humanity has been primarily punctuated by wars, except for the past 80 years, which have been unusually peaceful due to America’s leadership.
Wang has become a power player in Silicon Valley and D.C. Scale AI is used by the government for satellite imagery analysis in Ukraine and by OpenAI to create ChatGPT.
According to Forbes, Scale AI’s rise is similar to that of cloud software giants Snowflake and Datadog. His trusted advisor, former Amazon consumer boss Jeff Wilke, believes that Scale AI could become the Amazon Web Services of AI.
Competitors see Scale AI as a vulnerable company that has suffered layoffs and declining value on secondary markets in the past year, stripping Wang of his billionaire status. However, Wang has stated that they have been working on the problem of AI longer than anyone else, and they have built more technology to solve it.
Wang believes that there will always be a need for human involvement in the data labeling process, even as machines increasingly automate this work.
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