Source: Brazil Post English
The new youngest self-made billionaire, Alexandr Wang is a 25 year old entrepreneur who dropped out of MIT at 19. Following his formative years in the shadows of the nuclear weapons programme of America, he cofounded Scale AI. Currently, he is helping the Air Force, Army, GM and Flexport unlock their data’s potential. Now, his company uses AI to determine how much damage Russian bombs are inflicting on Ukraine.
Wang spent his childhood in the shadow of Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, the top-secret site where the US developed their first ever atomic bomb at the time of the Second World War. Both his parents were physicists who had worked on weapons project for the US military, which clearly now Wang does too. His six-year-old company, Scale AI, based in San Francisco, California, has already bagged three contracts worth about $350 million or more. These contracts are contingent on the needs of the government to aid the country’s Air Force and Army employ artificial intelligence.
Scale’s technology notably analyses satellite images way faster than human analysts in determining how much damage has been inflicted on Ukraine by Russian bombs since the February. Over 300 companies, such as General Motors and Flexport use Scale to aid them in getting the most of a plethora of raw informations. This information includes millions of shipping documents, or possibly raw footage from self driving vehicles.
“Our goal is to help them unlock the potential of the data and supercharge their businesses with AI.”
Appearing in the Forbes Under 30 list in 2018, Wang stated how each of the industries has ‘huge amounts of data’ under it. He stated his conglomerate’s aim is to ‘unlock the potential of the data’ and boost the business with artificial intelligence. A $325 million funding round in 2021 valued Scale at $7.3 billion, with an estimated generation of $100 million in revenue. Wand’s estimate stake of 15% is worth $1 billion, which makes him him the youngest self-made billionaire in the world.
In his childhood, Wang was a math who often took part in national math and coding competitions. He signed up for his first ever national math competition in sixth grade with the intention of securing a free ticket to Disney World. Though he did not win the competition, he got his trip to the destination anyway. By the age of seventeen, he was working full-time coding at Quora, the question-answer site. This was where he met the cofounder of Scale, Lucy Guo.
Soon, he made a quick detour to MIT to study machine learning, going on to start Scale with Guo the summer following his freshman year, with an investment from Y Combinator. He noted how he told his parents the project would be something he ‘did for the summer,’ but he clearly he never ‘went back to school.’
