Alexandr Wang

Alexandr Wang is the founder and chairman of Scale AI, the data and evaluation company he started in 2016 after leaving MIT. He led Scale as CEO through its rise as a supplier of labeled data and model evaluation for labs, enterprises, and governments, then stepped into a Meta chief AI officer role in 2025 while remaining Scale's founder and board chair.

Los Alamos roots and an early exit from MIT

Wang grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the son of physicists at the national lab, and competed in math, physics, and programming olympiads before taking early software jobs at Addepar and Quora. He briefly attended MIT, then left to co-found Scale with Lucy Guo through Y Combinator, betting that the bottleneck in machine learning would be reliable human-in-the-loop data rather than another modeling paper alone.

Building Scale as data infrastructure for AI

Under his leadership Scale expanded from annotation marketplaces into evaluation, safety testing, and government work, including contracts that put large-language-model testing in front of U.S. defense buyers. Public profiles describe him arguing that America's AI position depends as much on data pipelines and evaluation discipline as on model releases — a frame he carried into Washington testimony and later into Meta's superintelligence push after Meta's 2025 investment in Scale.

From Scale CEO to Meta and the Scale board

In June 2025 Wang joined Meta as chief AI officer and stepped down as Scale's CEO while staying on the board. Scale later named Francis deSouza CEO in 2026, with Wang publicly casting the handoff as the next operating chapter for a company he still chairs as founder.