MOBILIZING AI'S INFANTRY

BRIEFLY BECAME THE WORLD’S YOUNGEST SELF-MADE BILLIONAIRE BY SUPPLYING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE COMPANIES WITH THE ONE THING THEY ALL NEED: HUMANS. HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF THEM. NOW, HIS $7.3 BILLION STARTUP IS PRIMED TO CASH IN ON THE BIGGEST AI BOOM YET—UNLESS SOMEONE ELSE CAN DO IT BETTER OR CHEAPER

- KENRICK CAI

In 2018, ON A TRIP to his ancestral homeland, Alexandr Wang listened as China’s brightest engineers gave impressive presentations on artificial intelligence. He found it odd that the researchers conspicuously avoided any mention of how AI might be used. Wang, whose immigrant parents were nuclear physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first atomic bombs were designed, was unsettled.

“They were really dodgy on what the use cases were. You could tell it was for no good,” recalls Wang, the cofounder of Scale AI, who has no second “e” in his first name so that it has eight characters, a number associated with good fortune in Chinese culture. Scale was then an up-and-coming startup providing data services primarily to self-driving auto-makers. But Wang began to worry that AI might soon upend a world order that, excepting the fall of the Soviet Union, has remained mostly stable since World War II. “If you think about the history of humanity, it’s mostly been punctuated by war except the last 80 or so years, which have been unusually peaceful,” he says from Scale’s sixth-floor headquarters in downtown San Francisco, as the occasional (partly) self-driving car zips by below. “A lot of that has been because of American leadership in the world.”

At first glance, Wang, 26, exudes the skittish energy of a fresh college graduate. He listens to “sad girl” musicians like Gracie Abrams and Billie Eilish and dresses “gorpcore,” an in-vogue style of fashionable hiking clothes. He posts Instagram photos with actor Kiernan Shipka of Mad Men fame and spouts pithy nuggets on Twitter: “The best problems can only be solved by blood, sweat, tears, spirit and an overwhelming sense of purpose,” he wrote in one February tweet. At bars, he still gets carded regularly.