Alexandr Wang: The Man Who Sold Human Labor to Big AI Labs
Alexandr Wang built Scale AI on human labor that powers every major AI model. In 2025, Meta invested billions and brought him in to lead superintelligence work.
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Alexandr Wang built a company on what the industry talks about least: the human labor without which no model would exist. Scale AI, which he founded in 2016, supplied data labeled and evaluated by humans to the biggest labs, including OpenAI and Google. In 2025, Meta invested billions of dollars in the company and brought Wang in to lead work on superintelligence.
What Scale AI Actually Sells
A model learns not just from raw text scraped from the internet, but from examples evaluated by humans: which answer is better, what counts as an error, what a good solution to a task looks like. This work is done by thousands of people, largely in countries with low labor costs. Scale AI organized it into a service and built its valuation on that. It’s the least glamorous and one of the most important parts of the chain that produces models.
Why Meta Paid So Much
Because it was buying access to data and people at the same time. Mark Zuckerberg needed a team capable of bringing Meta’s models to the front, and the market for such people numbers in the hundreds, not thousands. The amount paid is a measure of how narrow that bottleneck is.
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Does Meta Own Scale AI?
Meta took a significant stake and brought in the founder, but the company continues to operate under its own brand. Check the source for structural details, as they have changed.
Who Labels Data for Models?
People hired by companies like Scale AI, often remotely and in countries with lower labor costs. The conditions of this work are the subject of regular criticism.
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