Scale AI's Teenage Billionaire

Shaan tells a story about Alexander Wang, who founded Scale AI and became the world's youngest self-made billionaire.

"Scale AI saw the machine learning trend and identified a key problem: when doing machine learning, you need data to be labeled. If you're trying to teach a computer how to recognize a kitten, you first have to train it and be able to correct it when it's wrong.

They created a giant workforce of overseas people that will label your images. If you're a self-driving car company like Waymo or Tesla, you get tons of footage that needs to be labeled - 'that was a dog crossing the street', 'that's a stop sign even though it's partially obstructed.'

Scale started as a labeling-as-a-service company. I'm sure they do more stuff now, but it's pretty crazy - it's like a $10 billion company now and Wang started it when he was 19. He was in a group chat with me briefly, but as soon as they really started taking off, he left saying he was too busy. That's the ultimate signal - when it really takes off, you don't stay in these chats anymore, you go do your billionaire thing."