San Francisco, June 14: Meta Platforms Inc is betting big on Alexandr Wang, the 27-year-old CEO of Scale AI, to spearhead its push into artificial superintelligence (ASI), in a bold $15 billion move aimed at reclaiming leadership in the high-stakes global AI race.
The investment will support a newly established research lab helmed by Wang, focused on building ASI systems—AI models with cognitive capabilities exceeding that of the human brain. The new lab is expected to include around 50 elite researchers, with Meta offering seven- to nine-figure compensation packages to attract top talent from rivals such as OpenAI and Google.
The partnership marks a pivotal moment for Meta, whose efforts to integrate AI across its product ecosystem—from Ray-Ban smart glasses to its social platforms Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—have thus far been overshadowed by more successful launches from competitors.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has championed open-source development through the release of the LLaMA family of large language models (LLMs), but internal challenges, including staff churn and underwhelming product rollouts, have stalled momentum. The company’s AI strategy had until now been steered by Yann LeCun, a Turing Award-winning scientist whose skepticism of LLMs as a path to artificial general intelligence (AGI) is at odds with prevailing Silicon Valley thought.
Wang’s appointment signals a strategic shift toward more aggressive AI innovation. A former Quora engineer and MIT dropout, Wang co-founded Scale AI in 2016 through startup accelerator Y Combinator. The San Francisco-based company has grown into a critical infrastructure provider for AI development, supplying training data to customers including OpenAI, Microsoft, Waymo, Toyota, and the U.S. government.
Scale AI uses a network of contract workers to annotate vast datasets that power LLMs and computer vision systems. It generated $870 million in revenue last year and expects to cross $2 billion in 2025, which could raise its valuation to $25 billion, according to Bloomberg.
The startup has not been without controversy. Its outsourcing arm, Remotasks, has come under scrutiny for labor practices in regions like Kenya, India, and Venezuela, where workers are reportedly paid less than $1 per hour to perform data labeling tasks.
Wang, who became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at age 24, has remained a relatively low-profile figure despite his growing influence. A close associate of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—reportedly his roommate during the COVID-19 pandemic—Wang was photographed earlier this year attending U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration alongside Altman.
For Meta, the gamble on Wang may be its most consequential move yet in the battle for AI dominance.
