Why Meta is Betting Nearly $15 Billion on Alexandr Wang
In recent months, Mark Zuckerberg increasingly sought the counsel of Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang about solutions to Meta’s AI problems. A deal between the companies will give him a shot at fixing them himself.
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tried to fix a seemingly existential problem in recent months. His company’s large language model, Llama, was falling behind competitors and struggling to perform as well as models from OpenAI, particularly on complex tasks.
Increasingly, Zuckerberg turned to an unlikely person for advice: Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, whose startup did the relatively low-grade work of hiring human experts to improve artificial intelligence models for an array of customers, including Meta. Wang was essentially a business guy with technical chops, not the kind of elite researcher Zuckerberg recently had been lavishing with attention—and offers of gigantic paydays. And Scale AI’s humble work sometimes made it a punching bag among Silicon Valley insiders, who didn’t put it in the same class as cutting-edge AI startups.