Alexander Wang dropped out of MIT at the age of 19 to co-found Scale AI after growing up in the shadows of the US nuclear weapons programme. He is now assisting organisations like the Air Force, Army, GM, and Flexport in realising the value of their data.
Under the shadow of the top-secret Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, where the United States created its first atomic bomb during World War II, Alexander Wang grew up.
His parents were scientists who worked on military weaponry programmes. And he does too: Scale AI, Wang’s six-year-old San Francisco-based business, has already signed three contracts worth up to $350 million, depending on the requirements of the government, to support the Air Force and Army of the United States in using artificial intelligence. This is very remarkable for a 25-year-old.
Scale’s technology uses satellite imagery to analyse damage Russian bombs are doing to Ukraine far more quickly than human analysts. It is helpful outside of the military.
More than 300 organisations, including General Motors and Flexport, employ Scale, which Wang founded when he was 19 to help them mine gold from vast streams of unprocessed data, such as unprocessed video from self-driving cars or millions of pieces of shipping paperwork.
According to Wang, who made the Forbes Under 30 list in 2018, “Every industry is sitting on massive volumes of data.” Our objective is to assist them in maximising the data’s potential and utilising AI to accelerate their businesses.
Scale, which brings in an estimated $100 million in revenue annually, was valued at $7.3 billion in a fundraising round of $325 million last year.
Scale, which brings in an estimated $100 million in revenue annually, was valued at $7.3 billion in a fundraising round of $325 million last year. Wang is the youngest self-made millionaire in the world, with an estimated 15% ownership worth $1 billion. Pedro Franceschi, a 25-year-old Brazilian creator of the credit card company Brex, is the second-youngest.
Wang was a maths prodigy in his youth and participated in national math and coding competitions. To win a complimentary trip to Disney World, he entered his first national math competition in the sixth grade. Although he came in last in the contest, he clenched his trip to the Magic Kingdom.
Alexander Wang met Scale’s cofounder, Lucy Guo, when he was just 17 years old and was working full-time as a programmer at the question-and-answer website Quora. After a brief detour to MIT to study machine learning, he founded Scale alongside Guo with funding from Y Combinator in the summer following his first year.
Wang claims that I informed my parents that it would only be something I did for the summer. “Obviously, I never went back to school.”
Wang, thank you for your amazing contributions. It’s really inspiring, and at the same time, I am motivated once again to continue pursuing my coding career and other stuff I’m venturing into. Thanks once again!