Alexandr Wang is an American entrepreneur and the founder of Scale AI, a data-labeling and data-annotation company that became a core supplier of human-labeled training data and human feedback pipelines to major AI labs during the Large language model era.
Wang dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was studying computer science and physics, to found Scale AI in 2016 with Lucy Guo. The company began by providing labeled training data for computer vision applications such as autonomous vehicles, then expanded into the annotation, evaluation and human-feedback work underlying RLHF pipelines used to align chatbots and other AI products, and later into government and defense-oriented data and evaluation contracts. Scale AI's client roster came to include most major frontier labs, giving it a central, if largely invisible, role in the AI supply chain. In 2021, at age 24, Wang became one of the youngest self-made billionaires, based on Scale AI's valuation in a private funding round.
Meta investment and Superintelligence Labs
In June 2025, Meta announced an investment of roughly 14 to 15 billion dollars for a stake of about 49 percent in Scale AI, one of the largest AI-related private investments to date. As part of the deal, Wang left his operating role at Scale AI to join Meta directly, where he was put in charge of a newly formed group, internally described as Meta's Superintelligence Labs, tasked with pursuing frontier AGI-level model research. The move was widely read as an aggressive talent and technology acquisition by Meta in response to competitive pressure from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, and it triggered a wave of high-profile researcher hiring across the industry.
Reception
Wang's rise mirrors a broader story in the AI industry of infrastructure and services companies becoming enormously valuable as the field scaled, even without building models themselves. Critics have raised concerns about labor conditions among Scale AI's global network of outsourced data annotators, whose work underpins the RLHF and evaluation pipelines central to modern Chatbot alignment. Wang's shift from running an independent data-services company to leading a lab embedded inside Meta also raised questions in the industry about Scale AI's continued neutrality as a vendor to Meta's competitors.