A year ago, Forbes magazine highlighted Alexandr Wang as one of the youngest new millionaires in the world. At that time, the 25-year-old (now 26) amassed the enormous amount of 1,000 million dollars, and all thanks to a phenomenon that was still in its infancy at the time: artificial intelligence.
Wang became a billionaire thanks to his talent for technology and programming, something that led him to experiment in developing applications and software. The son of a Chinese nuclear physicist who worked at the military base where the first Oppenheimer nuclear bomb was created, Wang has managed to carve out a career that has led him to the top.
Alexandr Wang is the son of a Chinese nuclear couple who immigrated to New Mexico to work at the aforementioned military base. At the age of 17, he began working as a programmer at the Quora portal, where he met Lucy Guo, the businesswoman with whom he would found the startup that has changed their lives.
Wang began his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but quickly dropped out to pursue his entrepreneurial vein. In an interview with Forbes, he revealed: “I told my parents that this was going to be something that I would only do during the summer. Obviously, I never went back to school.”
So he created Scale AI, which he himself defines as “the picks and shovels in the gold rush of generative artificial intelligence.” Wang was right to collaborate with companies with a large flow of data, such as AirBnB or Toyota. These multinationals needed a tool to label their information, and this is where Scale AI came in.
Today Wang owns one of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley, valued at more than 7.3 billion dollars. Likewise, Scale AI has obtained investments with the United States Department of Defense or OpenAI, so the US military uses Wang’s creation to improve the satellite image recognition system and monitor the impacts of Russian missiles in Ukraine.
Its creation is not only of interest to the government, but also to companies like Lyft, General Motors or Flexport, which is why there are currently more than 300 companies that use Scale to simplify the wave of data and treat it with ease.
At 26, Wang may be the next youngest billionaire in world history. So much so that he could soon be on a par with moguls like Elon Musk—whom he admires—Mark Zuckerberg or even Jeff Bezos.
