Scale AI's Wang brings Meta deep industry connections

Alexandr Wang, co-founder of Scale AI, has parlayed his networking skills into a $14.3 billion investment from Meta and a new job in Meta's 'superintelligence' group, writes Ellen Huet from San Francisco

- Ellen Huet

Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang is such an enthusiastic networker that his former roommate — OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman — once jokingly told him to tone it down a bit.

Fortunately for Mr Wang, he ignored the advice. Last week, the 28-year-old parlayed his ability to cultivate influential relationships into a $14.3 billion investment from Meta in Scale AI, and a new job for himself in Meta's “superintelligence” group, reporting to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. His own cash and equity in the deal is worth more than $5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. What Meta is buying: the one guy who knows what everyone else in the AI industry is doing.

In recent months, Mr Wang has become close with Mr Zuckerberg and has spent time at the Meta CEO's houses in Tahoe and Palo Alto, California, discussing the future of AI, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr Zuckerberg developed a strong admiration for him, the people said.

Mr Wang is also close with Mr Altman, who before OpenAI used to run the elite start-up accelerator Y Combinator. Scale went through YC in 2016, and the two men lived together for a period during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to other people who know the two men.

At first glance, the Wang hiring looks a lot like the other expensive not-quite-acquisitions by Meta's big tech competitors. Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet have also thrown gargantuan sums at AI researchers with advanced degrees and experience building cutting-edge models, sometimes by inking licensing deals with their companies.

But Mr Wang stands out because he's not an academic nor is he running a prominent AI model maker — he's just really good at knowing what's going on in the industry. His company, Scale, deals with the grunt work of human-powered data collection that's needed to build machine learning models, and most of the important companies have been his customers.