Can Alexandr Wang Bring Meta AI Supremacy?

The 28-year-old startup founder has been tapped by Mark Zuckerberg to lead an AI dream team with hundreds of billions in resources and orders to achieve superintelligence. No pressure.

- BY SHARON GOLDMAN

FULL SPEED AHEAD Alexandr Wang has the keys to Meta's sprawling AI operations.

IN THE SUMMER OF 2016, Alexandr Wang was a 19-year-old building his data-labeling startup, Scale AI, in a Silicon Valley pool house with his cofounder, Lucy Guo, while the two participated in the Y Combinator startup accelerator. When not working, the two founders slept on air mattresses and pondered the fledgling business's potential.

Less than a decade later, the pool house project has reset expectations and plans across the tech industry's highest levels. In June, Mark Zuckerberg handed the now 28-year-old Wang the keys to Meta’s entire AI operations as part of a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. As Meta’s first-ever chief AI officer, Wang now leads a newly formed superintelligence team packed with AI industry superstars paid like high-priced athletes, and oversees Meta’s other AI product and research teams—all under the umbrella of a new organization called Meta Superintelligence Labs.

This AI dream team, and Wang's role as its captain, mark the latest chapter in a Silicon Valley narrative that’s practically a cliché by now: a new wunderkind rising in tandem with the next world-changing technology. In this case, however, rather than disrupting the old guard, Wang is leaping to action to help an established tech giant, which happens to be run by the previous generation’s whiz kid.