Alexandr Wang, the 27-year-old founder of Scale AI, has built a billion-dollar company that is laying the groundwork for modern AI development. As Berber Jin reports in an article for the Wall Street Journal, Scale AI employs more than 100,000 contractors worldwide who write text and label images to train chatbots and other AI systems. The company’s revenue has tripled in the last year, resulting in a valuation of $14 billion.
But managing this network of contractors has been a challenge for Scale AI. Some complain about low wages and late payments, for example, while others try to game the system to make more money. Wang himself describes the business as “mundane and unsexy” and wants to focus on developing software tools for businesses. Despite these difficulties, Scale AI has attracted major clients such as Meta, Google, and OpenAI, and continues to expand.