Alexandr Wang, 28, Meta’s AI Visionary: Leading the Charge for Superintelligence
In the high-stakes world of artificial intelligence, where new ideas come up at a breakneck pace, Alexandr Wang is one of the few people who perfectly embodies the mix of youthful boldness and technical skill. Wang is only 28 years old and is now the Chief AI Officer at Meta, one of the most important tech companies in the world. Wang was born in January 1997, when America’s nuclear legacy was still fresh in people’s minds. His journey from being a great coder in New Mexico to leading Meta’s ambitious superintelligence efforts sounds like a story from Silicon Valley. His appointment in June 2025, along with a huge $14.3 billion investment in his old startup, Scale AI, marks not only a personal victory but also a huge change in the global AI landscape. Meta is up against competitors like OpenAI and Google, and Wang’s leadership could change the way we use smart machines—or leave the company behind.
Wang’s story starts in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a town known for scientific breakthroughs and where the atomic bomb was made as part of the Manhattan Project. His parents were Chinese immigrants and physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and they put him in an environment where he had to ask a lot of questions. Wang had a strange knack for math and programming from a young age. By the time he was in sixth grade, he was competing in national math contests. He even won a trip to Disney World as a prize once. He won a lot of awards as a teenager: he was a finalist in the USA Computing Olympiad (USACO) in 2012 and 2013, he qualified for the Math Olympiad Program in 2013, and he was chosen for the US Physics Team in 2014. These weren’t just hobbies; they were signs of a mind that was ready for complexity.
Wang’s dreams took him west to Silicon Valley after he graduated from Los Alamos High School. He got a job as a software engineer at Quora, the question-and-answer site, when he was still a teenager. This helped him improve his coding skills in real-world situations. He started studying math and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2015. This was a good fit for his analytical mind. But, like the typical tech dropout, Wang only lasted a year. The draw of being an entrepreneur was too strong. He joined Y Combinator, a well-known startup accelerator, in the summer of 2016 when he was 19 years old. He also co-founded Scale AI with Lucy Guo, another Quora alum and MIT dropout.
Scale AI came about because of a simple but important realization: AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on. Wang imagined a platform that could label, comment on, and rate huge datasets with the same level of accuracy as a human, but much faster. Early customers included General Motors and Uber, two companies that were working on self-driving cars and needed very carefully tagged images for navigation.
Wang was the CEO, and Scale grew a lot. In 2018, both he and Guo made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for business technology. Guo left soon after because they had different ideas, but Wang kept going and got support from big names like former Amazon executive Jeff Wilke.
The company’s path took off like a rocket in 2021. A funding round put Scale’s value at $7.3 billion, making Wang, who was then 24 years old, a billionaire with a net worth of more than $1 billion and 15% of the company.
He became the youngest self-made billionaire in the world, which showed how smart he was. Scale’s workforce grew to hundreds of thousands through subsidiaries like Remotasks and Outlier AI, which hired global annotators to do data tasks. This model that combined humans and AI led to big improvements in image recognition, natural language processing, and other areas. By 2024, Scale was worth almost $14 billion and worked with clients like Airbnb and the Pentagon. The U.S. military hired Scale for defense contracts, such as testing big language models for strategic planning. This was a nod to Wang’s hometown, which was built on national security.
Wang had an impact on more than just business. He lived in an apartment in San Francisco with Sam Altman, who is now the CEO of OpenAI, during the COVID-19 pandemic. This helped him make connections in the tech elite. He became a hawk on AI geopolitics in the political world. Wang wrote a letter to the US in January 2025, when Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, asking them to “win the AI war” against China. That month, he spoke at the World Economic Forum and talked about the competition between the U.S. and China in models like DeepSeek. Wang met with leaders from around the world in February to talk about how important it is for countries to work together on AI. These leaders were Keir Starmer from the UK, Narendra Modi from India, Emmanuel Macron from France, and Mike Johnson from the US House of Representatives. He believes that America’s strength comes from combining human creativity with technological superiority.
But Scale wasn’t without its problems. Critics slammed its labor practices, saying that annotators in developing countries were paid very little for hard work. Wang defended the model as necessary for scaling AI in a moral way, putting “human values at the forefront.” Wang is still a mystery to me. There were rumors that he was dating actress Kiernan Shipka, but no one confirmed them. Some sources say he’s single or doesn’t talk about his personal life. He has been playing the violin since he was nine years old, and he balances intense activities with quieter ones like coding marathons.
The switch to Meta was both bold and necessary. In June 2025, Meta announced that it had bought a $14.3 billion stake in Scale, giving it 49% ownership but no voting rights. It also hired Wang to lead its AI efforts. Then a small group of Scale engineers came. Jason Droege, Scale’s chief strategy officer, took over as CEO on a temporary basis. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta was frustrated by the lukewarm response to Llama models. Wang was a new bet for him, as he was an entrepreneur instead of just a researcher.
Wang is in charge of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), which is the main group for all of Meta’s AI work. He is in charge of a “dream team” of superstars who are paid like athletes and work on products, research, and infrastructure. Wang sent out a bold memo in August 2025 that reorganized MSL into four pillars: Training (led by a team building massive models), Research (supported by FAIR and a new TBD Lab under chief scientist Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of ChatGPT), Products (bringing AI into Meta’s ecosystem), and Infrastructure (scaling compute power). He is in charge of leaders like Nat Friedman and Aparna Ramani, which makes things easier for “personal superintelligence,” or AI that is smarter than humans in every way.
This reorganization isn’t just a bureaucratic move; it’s a call to arms. Meta is spending billions on AI data centers, which are similar to Microsoft’s OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind. Wang’s knowledge of data from Scale gives Meta the edge in training datasets, which are the “fuel” for models like Llama. But there are many people who are doubtful. There are a lot of questions on Reddit: Is a “data engineer” ready for breakthroughs in superintelligence? Wang isn’t a pioneer in algorithms like Yann LeCun, but his success in making Scale a unicorn shows that doing something is more important than thinking about it.
Wang’s memos and talks show that he believes AI should be in line with human values so that progress can be made without risk. He once said, “Making something that matters is beautiful, scary, and painful.” He is giving teams more power at Meta by making reporting lines flat. This helps them be flexible in a field where a model can become obsolete in six months. What did he learn from his playbook? You need to be ready for big changes; vision without grit fades away.
Wang’s time at Meta could make it a part of AI history in the future. If MSL can figure out superintelligence, it could make AR glasses more personal, change social media feeds, or protect against threats from other countries. Failure could mean that Zuckerberg’s empire falls apart because of competition. For a 28-year-old who used to write code in a pool house, the stakes are very high. Wang, who always wants to win the Olympics, loves them. In a time when AI controls the future, his story reminds us that the future isn’t something we get from our parents; it’s something we build, one labeled dataset at a time.