Alexandr Wang: Building Scale AI, Transforming Work With Agents & Competing With China

Since we recorded this Light Cone episode with Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang, Meta has agreed to invest over $14 billion in Scale, valuing the company at $29 billion. Alex has also announced he will lead Meta's new AI Superintelligence Lab. Our conversation you're about to hear covers the history leading up to this investment, from Scale's early days at YC to its integral role in the training of foundational models. Let's get to it.

The AI industry really continues to suffer from a lack of, uh, very hard evals and very hard tests that show really like the frontier of model capabilities. The biggest thing is you just have to really, really, really care. When you interview people or when you interact with people, you can tell people who are just sort of like phone it in, versus people who sort of like hang onto their work. It's like th- so incredibly monumental and forceful and important to them that they, they do great work. Very exciting time to, to see the... how the frontier of human knowledge expands.

Welcome to another episode of The Light Cone. Today, we have a real treat. It's Alexander Wang of Scale AI. Jared, you worked with, uh, Alexander way back in the beginning actually. Uh, what was that like? What year was it? Put us in the spot.

Yeah, Alex, I mean, most of what we want to talk about today is like what Scale is doing now 'cause like th- the current stuff is like so, so awesome and so interesting. Since Scale got started at YC, I thought it just seemed appropriate to start all the way at the start. And, um, it is funny, uh, Diane and I were at MIT last month talking to college students, and like of all the founders, the one that they like most look up to and like want to emulate is actually you. Like everybody wants to be the next Alexander Wang 'cause everybody knows the story of how you like dropped out of MIT and, and, and ended up starting Scale. But they don't know the real story. And so I thought it'd be cool to go back to the beginning and just talk about the real story of how you ended up dropping out of MIT and starting Scale.

So before I went to MIT, I worked at, um, Quora for a year. And so this is 2015 to 2016. Or no, sorry, 2014 to 2015 was when I worked as a software engineer. And this was already at a point in the market where ML engineers, as they were called, or like machine learning engineers, uh, made more than software engineers. So that was already like the market state at that point. I went to these summer camps, um, that were, that were organized by, um, by Rationalists, the Rationality community in San Francisco. So, um, and they were for precocious teens, but they were organized by, um, uh, many people who have become pivotal in the AI industry. So one of the organizers is this guy Paul Christiano who, um, used to, uh... who's the inventor of RLHF actually, and now he run or is a research director at the US AI Safety Institute. He was at OpenAI for a long time. Um, Greg Brockman came and gave a speech at one point. Eliezer Yudkowsky came and gave a speech at one point. And actually it was very like when I was... I don't know, must have been, uh, 16, I was exposed to this concept that like potentially the most important thing to work on in my lifetime was AI and AI safety. So something I was exposed to very e- early on. So then when I went to MIT, I was... started MIT when I was 18. I like studied AI quite deeply, that was most of what I did in the sort of day job. And then, um, uh, kind of got antsy, applied to YC, and then the idea was kind of like, okay, how could... Initially it was like, okay, where can you apply, um, sort of like AI to things. And this was, um, in the era of chatbots, which is like crazy to think about actually-