Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old CEO and co-founder of Scale AI, is leaving his position to head up a new superintelligence unit at Meta following the company’s $14 billion investment in Scale AI. The move represents Meta’s aggressive push to catch up in the commercial AI race after being outpaced by competitors like OpenAI and Google, with Wang bringing crucial insights from his role at the data-labeling company that has worked with many of Meta’s rivals.
Why this matters: Meta has largely watched from the sidelines as other tech giants dominated AI development, particularly after its failed Metaverse gambit during the pandemic left the company scrambling to regain relevance in Silicon Valley’s AI-driven landscape.
What you should know: Wang isn’t being hired primarily for his technical expertise but rather for his business acumen and deep understanding of the AI competitive landscape.
- Meta had initially planned to announce Wang as the company’s new chief AI officer but ultimately decided against the title, according to a source familiar with the matter.
- Wang is seen internally as someone who can help make Meta’s AI business profitable and pivot quickly as AI focus shifts from self-driving cars to generative AI chatbots.
- Yann LeCun, a Turing Award-winning scientist, remains Meta’s chief AI scientist and has previously clashed with CEO Mark Zuckerberg over AI hype.
The Scale AI advantage: Wang built Scale into a crucial middleman for AI development by providing gig workers who label images, tweak text, and correct AI system mistakes.
- Scale AI, founded in 2016 by Wang and Lucy Guo, operates at the fringes of the AI explosion but remains essential to its growth, working with OpenAI, Google, and the Department of Defense.
- The company uses platforms called Outlier AI and Remotasks to complete tasks that teach AI models to work properly.
- As Scale’s original CEO, Wang understands the strengths and limitations of competing products in the marketplace, giving Meta a potential edge.
Team transitions: Wang is bringing key Scale AI talent to Meta as he builds his new superintelligence team.
- Julian Michael, who led Scale’s Safety, Evaluations, and Alignment Lab, and Summer Yue, head of research at Scale, will work under Wang at Meta.
- More hiring announcements are expected in the coming weeks.
- Wang will be cut off from Scale’s remaining data-labeling operations and will no longer have access to competitors’ models.
What they’re saying: Meta’s chief AI scientist has been publicly skeptical of current AI development approaches.
- “We are not going to get to human-level AI by just scaling up LLMs. This is just not going to happen. There’s no way — absolutely no way,” LeCun told the Big Technology podcast recently.
Background context: Scale AI has faced worker complaints and regulatory scrutiny over its gig work platforms.
- Workers have complained of tough experiences on the platforms, including instances of what one group called “wage theft” in a letter to U.S. senators in February.
- A Department of Labor investigation into Scale AI was called off earlier this year.
- Wang has recently focused on sounding alarms about China as an AI superpower and meeting with world leaders to discuss the importance of data in AI training.
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