Alexandr Wang grew up in the shadow of the top-secret Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, where the US developed the first atomic bomb during World War II. His parents were physicists who worked on military weapons projects.
Wang left MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) at the age of 19 to co-found Scale AI, a software company.
He is now assisting around 300 companies, as well as the United States Air Force and Army, in unlocking the data potential of their data by delivering high-quality training data for AI applications.
He is the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, at the age of 25, and his firm uses artificial intelligence to calculate the amount of damage Russian bombs cause in Ukraine.
Scale AI’s technology examines satellite images much faster and more accurately than human analysts, and it’s not just for the military.
According to Forbes, Scale is used by over 300 companies, including Flexport and General Motors, to help retrieve information from raw data such as self-driving car footage or millions of documents.
Wang told Forbes, “Every industry is resting on huge amounts of data. Our goal is to assist them in unlocking the data’s potential and using AI to supercharge their businesses.”
According to the Forbes report, he founded the company when he was 19 years old, and it is now valued at $7.3 billion after a $325 million funding round last year.
Wang owns a 15% stake in the company, which is worth an estimated $1 billion, making him the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.
Wang was a math prodigy as a kid, competing in national math as well as coding competitions. He entered his first national math competition in sixth grade, hoping to win a free trip to Disney World. Although he did not win the competition, he did secure his trip to the magical kingdom.
By the age of 17, he was working full-time as a programmer at Quora, a question-and-answer website where he met Lucy Guo, Scale’s cofounder.
