At 19, Alexandr Wang dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) while studying machine learning and co-founded San Francisco-based Scale AI in 2016. His firm has been helping the US' Air Force and the Army to implement artificial intelligence (AI) to optimise their data. It has already signed contracts amounting to at least USD 350 million, according to a Forbes article.
In 2021, after a USD 325-million funding round, Scale was valued at USD 7.3 billion, as per Forbes. With an estimated stake of 15 percent, which equals to USD 1 billion, Wang is the world's youngest self-made billionare at the age of 25.
EARLY YEARS
Wang's parents, who were physicists, worked on weapons projects for the US military. This is what, perhaps, inspired Wang to build a future in this field.
As a kid, he participated in national maths and coding competitions. Wang signed up for his first national maths competition in the sixth grade, hoping to get a free ticket to Disney World. Although he did not win the competition, he still managed to visit the magical place.
By 17, he was working as a full-time coder at Quora, a question-and-answer website. It was here that Wang met Lucy Guo, who would go on to become Scale AI's co-founder.
Wang then decided to study machine learning and joined MIT. Procuring an investment from Y Combinator, he launched Scale here, along with Guo the following year.
At the time, he had told his parents that it was "just going to be a thing I did for the summer," according to Forbes, but he never went back to school.
