MAJOR SCALE
Alexandr Wang’s company, Scale AI, is fueling artificial intelligence for everyone from Airbnb to the U.S. Air Force.
He's sweating $7.3 billion worth of teeny-tiny details.
Alexandr Wang, 25
SCALE AI
As a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alexandr Wang was the casualty of a wickedness that plagues college campuses the world over: His roommates were stealing his food. Specifically, they were taking his yogurts. "Yogurt is one of the easiest foods to steal, because it's so perfectly contained," he says. "It's the perfect crime." So Wang put a camera on the inside of his fridge that he hoped would not just record the happenings of the fridge for him to review later, but know on its own that a yogurt had gone missing. He soon realized, though, that such a system would need to learn quite a lot to do what, for a human sentry, would be a relatively simple task. For one, the system would have to learn what a yogurt looks like-and, just as important, what it doesn't look like. After all, plenty of other things are also perfectly contained. It would also have to learn the numerous places the yogurt might be in the fridge, and the copious configurations of surrounding items. To gain this artificial intelligence, his system would not only need a wealth of images to learn from; it would need the important parts of those images to be labeled. This idea of labeling is key. Only then could the AI learn the nature of the relevant elements. Only then could the data become useful. Indeed, only then could his system spot yogurt theft.
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