Alexandr Wang

Alexandr Wang (born 1997 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to physicist parents) dropped out of MIT at 19 to found Scale AI in 2016. The company built the unglamorous backbone of the AI boom — armies of human annotators labeling data for self-driving cars and, later, reinforcement-learning feedback for frontier LLMs — making Wang the world’s youngest self-made billionaire by his mid-twenties.

AI as a national-security race

Wang has spent years arguing that AI supremacy is a matter of national survival. He testified before Congress on the U.S.–China AI competition, and the day after Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025 Scale took out a full-page Washington Post ad addressed to the new president: “America must win the AI war,” with a five-point plan for federal investment. In June 2025, Meta invested $14.3 billion for 49 percent of Scale and hired Wang as its chief AI officer, where he leads Meta Superintelligence Labs alongside Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar talent raid on rival labs.

His rise has not been without criticism. Investigations documented low pay and precarious conditions among Scale’s overseas gig annotators, and skeptics questioned whether a 28-year-old data-labeling founder should command Meta’s superintelligence effort. Wang is unmoved: he describes AI as the defining technology of the century and treats building it — faster than China — as both a business and a duty.