Billionaire at 24, Alexandr Wang builds AI for US Defense – 6/3/2023 – Tech

Alexandr Wang, 26, leads the first company to train an artificial intelligence with sensitive US government data, Scale AI. He is the son of physicists emigrating from China, who now work at the nuclear weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Wang raked in his first billion dollars at age 24 from Scale AI’s core business: subcontracting people to clean and label data used to train large language models.

This guaranteed US$ 250 million (R$ 1.25 billion) in revenue for the company in 2022, compared to US$ 28 million (R$ 140 million) that the creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI, had in the same period. Scale AI is one of the few profitable companies in the business, along with the now trillionaire Nvidia.

US government contracts are another important source of income for Wang’s business. In January 2022, the US Department of Defense announced a $249 million purchase agreement with Scale AI, which committed to developing an autonomous system capable of analyzing images, performing visual searches and understanding natural language-based commands — how does ChatGPT.

From there came the development of Scale Donovan, presented to the public on May 10th. The platform can be integrated into US military mobile devices and is capable of working with maps, accessing real-time data and maintaining communication with command bases.

“It allows a decision that would take weeks to be made in minutes,” Wang said in an interview with Bloomberg.

To gain access to classified US government content securely, Scale AI hired defense experts — rather than using the army of third-party workers around the world that it has at its disposal. Wang himself said this in an interview with CNN on Tuesday (30).

The report tried to contact Scale AI to talk to representatives of the companies during the month of May, but the company said it did not have spokespersons available. He also sent a message to the young AI entrepreneur’s phone number available on LinkedIn, but received no response.

A subsidiary of Scale AI not announced in promotional materials, Remotasks, brokers temporary jobs related to training artificial intelligence in poor countries such as Kenya, the Philippines and Venezuela. About 240,000 people are on the platform, according to the US magazine Forbes.

This service, however, is essential for AI companies that need organized information in training neural networks that support large language models.

To Forbes, one of Wang’s closest advisors, Jeff Wilke, says that Scale AI can become for artificial intelligence what Amazon Web Services is for the internet. Wilke is a former director of customer service for Amazon.

Expectations of this magnitude made Scale AI be valued at US$ 7.3 billion (R$ 36.5 billion) in 2021, during its last round of investments. That’s how Wang became a billionaire. Among the startup’s investors are well-known venture funds such as Founders Fund, Tigers Global and Y Combinator, already headed by OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman.

Wang’s relationship with the US government is not limited to his contract with the Department of Defense. Scale AI has also provided the White House with a platform that assesses risks of artificial intelligence models.

Wang told CNN that this service will be essential for the government to define the regulatory framework responsible for the sector.

In this matter, the young man pulls the sardine to the side of his business. Well-cleaned and well-characterized databases would be the foundation for responsible and efficient models.

Scale AI’s commercial success weighs in favor of its founder’s argument. The company serves OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft and other major players in the AI ​​market. It also provides services in the area of ​​self-driving cars to Tesla and Toyota.

While recognizing the existential risk of artificial intelligence, Wang sides with experts and executives who consider it impossible to stop the development of the technology, in an environment of competition with China.

“Data supremacy is the number one requirement in an artificial intelligence war,” writes Wang in an edition of the newsletter he subscribes to.

The dispute with China was also the subject of the presentation by the creator of Scale AI at TED. The United States is matched by the Xi Jinping country’s ability to plan for the long term, according to Wang.

Weapons equipped with AI will be ten times more lethal and intelligent, he projects.

Wang usually says that his desire to work with artificial intelligence came about on a trip he took to China in 2018, where he heard the best engineers address the topic. The entrepreneur, however, considers his family’s country of origin the opponent to be overcome.

At TED, he called on technology experts to work for national security against regimes he called authoritarian. “We need to fight for a world we want to live in. It has never mattered more.”