Fun Fact: Alexandr Wang and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, stayed in the same apartment during the 2020 lockdown.
Alexandr Wang, CEO of a unicorn tech start-up, should not be confused with Alexander Wang, the fashion designer. Alexandr is a golden boy in tech right now. He has stated many times that growing up in Silicon Valley significantly influenced his career and interest in technology.
Alexandr’s parents are renowned physicists in the United States, specializing in nuclear weapons. After dropping out of high school as a junior, Alexandr started working for Quora as a programmer. The young visionary later dropped out of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was studying machine learning at only 19, to focus on building a company.
Alexandr didn’t drop out without skills—he has excellent coding and entrepreneurship skills. His company, Scale AI, founded by him and Lucy Guo, provides data labeling and management services to help businesses develop and improve their artificial intelligence systems.
As of July 2024, Scale AI is valued at $13 billion while Alexandr Wang’s net worth is set at $2 billion.
And Ladies, He’s Single. Maybe.
And now a bit of gossip. The 27-year-old billionaire seems to be an overqualified bachelor. He’s many girls’ dream man, but Alexandr seems to be a quiet and private person when it comes to his romantic life.
However, he has been seen posting pictures with the beautiful Hollywood actress Kiernan Shipka, and she has referred to him as the “world’s best boyfriend.”
Big Data (Annotation)
Alexandr loves to talk about how he got into the world of AI. Like all entrepreneurs, he identified a problem and solved it. In high school, he wanted to build a camera inside his fridge so it would tell him when he was out of groceries and what he needed to get. But he quickly realized he couldn’t do that because there wasn’t enough data to train the program on. And so he set out on a mission to find a solution—that image recognition task was the birth of Scale AI.
Scale AI, the brainchild of Alex, specializes in providing AI infrastructure to help businesses develop and deploy machine learning systems. Their original plan, when the company began about eight years ago, focused on data labeling and annotation.
High-quality data labeling services are needed for training supervised machine learning models. Scale’s “innovation” was using humans to train AI in those areas AI can’t easily do alone. They do this by hiring workers (mostly overseas) to sit and identify images for hours on end, annotating various types of data. These annotations provide the necessary structure for models to learn from the data and improve their predictive accuracy.
In a photo containing a dragon fruit and a rambutan, the annotation process might involve drawing bounding boxes around each fruit and labeling them with the appropriate tags. It helps the AI model learn to recognize and differentiate between these exotic fruits in future images.
Controversies of Scale
Alexandr Wang hasn’t been directly involved in any controversies, but Remotasks, a company under Scale AI responsible for directly hiring data-labeling workers, has been involved in several controversies over the years, particularly regarding labor practices, worker treatment, and payment issues. The platform connects workers with tasks related to data labeling and other micro-tasks. Many workers have complained about the low pay on Remotasks.
