Alexandr Wang

Alexandr Wang co-founded Scale AI in 2016 to supply labeled training data for AI systems, and ran it as CEO until June 2025. He then left Scale to become Meta's chief AI officer after Meta acquired 49% of the company, according to Forbes.

Growing Up Among Nuclear Physicists

Wang's parents were nuclear physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. "In my town, basically everybody's parents worked for the National Lab," he told Fortune. He became a nationally ranked mathlete and studied the violin. "My sport was math," he later said on a podcast, as quoted by The Business Times.

Leaving MIT After One Year

At 17, Wang landed full-time engineering jobs in Silicon Valley at the fintech Addepar and then at Quora, Forbes reported in his profile. He enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but dropped out after a brief stint. He told his parents he would go back, which he later called "a little white lie."

Pivoting a Doctor-Booking Idea into Data Labeling

In 2016 he teamed up with Lucy Guo, a Thiel Fellow, and the pair applied to Y Combinator with an idea for a doctor-booking app. After joining the accelerator that summer, they pivoted to data labeling, starting with data for self-driving cars, according to Fortune. Meta's 2025 deal valued Scale at around $29 billion.