AI prodigy Alexandr Wang earns spot at Meta, taking a seat in the technology titan's highest echelons.
Meta, the social media giant, is making significant strides in its quest to surpass human intelligence with the help of Alexandr Wang, the billionaire founder of Scale AI. In 2025, Wang joined Meta as the Chief AI Officer, leading its superintelligence unit and overall AI operations.
This move came after Meta invested $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, a leading data-labeling and model evaluation company. The deal was primarily focused on catching up with rivals in the race to develop and commercialise AI.
Wang brought his expertise in scaling AI services and managing high-quality training data to Meta, addressing prior challenges the company faced with training data quality, coordination of AI research, and internal evaluation frameworks. Under his leadership, Meta formed a new organization called Meta Superintelligence Labs, assembling top AI talent to accelerate advanced AI model development and commercialization.
The strategic move aimed to secure critical data resources and talent to compete in the evolving AI landscape and to disrupt competitors like OpenAI and Google, which previously relied on Scale AI’s services. In essence, Wang’s role was pivotal in transforming Meta’s AI ambitions by integrating elite AI expertise and advanced training data capabilities into Meta’s strategy.
Wang's arrival at Meta has had a "halo effect," with Mark Zuckerberg rearranging the desks at Meta's Menlo Park headquarters to seat Wang and other top AI talent as close to himself as possible. Zuckerberg has also continued his recruitment blitz of top AI talent as Meta reinvents itself as an AI titan.
Before joining Meta, Wang co-founded Scale AI with Lucy Guo in 2016. Scale's services for labeling and managing data for AI models became in-demand, making Wang the world’s youngest billionaire by 2021.
Wang's parents, Chinese immigrant physicists who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, named him Alexandr (missing the final e) for numerologically lucky benefits. He finished high school early and dropped out of MIT to start his own company in San Francisco.
In a 2022 TED talk, Wang observed that his parents were "brilliant scientists" who accomplished a lot in advancing their field. He has long idolized Mark Zuckerberg, and the two have become close in recent months, spending time at Zuckerberg's houses in Tahoe and Palo Alto, California.
Dan Levine of Accel, an early investor in Scale, noted that Scale and Nvidia are the few companies with deep relationships with top AI research teams. The investment in Scale was Meta's biggest since buying WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014.
Wang's influence extends beyond AI development at Meta. He may have influenced Zuckerberg’s management style, having ditched diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at Scale in favor of a "MEI" ("merit, excellence, and intelligence") hiring policy.
In summary, the integration of Alexandr Wang and his team at Meta is a significant step towards the company's goal of achieving AI superintelligence. The strategic move not only secures critical resources and talent but also disrupts competitors in the evolving AI landscape.
- With the integration of Alexandr Wang and his team, Meta is accelerating its efforts in artificial-intelligence development, aiming to surpass human intelligence.
- Before joining Meta, Wang, co-founder of Scale AI, was a leading figure in the field of entrepreneurship and finance, investing in technology and artificial-intelligence services.
- Under Wang's leadership, Meta is investing in business ventures, such as acquiring a majority stake in Scale AI, to catch up with competitors in the race to commercialize AI, revolutionizing the sector through artificial-intelligence investments.
