[DebtDeflation]

It's a wild story for sure. Dropped out of MIT after freshman year and starts Scale to do data labeling. Three years later Scale has a $1B valuation and two years after that Wang is the world's youngest billionaire. Nine years after Scale's founding they're still doing less than $1B in annual revenue. Yet Meta is doing a $14B acquihire. There's definitely more than meets the eye. I suspect it involves multiple world governments including the US.

[tyre]

> Dropped out of MIT after freshman year and starts Scale to do data labeling

I was in their YC batch, so two notes:

1. He didn't start it himself 2. They weren't doing data labeling when they entered YC. They pivoted to this.

[andytratt]

nor did he finish it himself. the Scale team has always been extremely talent-dense.

but execution is everything, and Alex has certainly been the dictator executing without peer or co-leads for over half a decade now.

"API for human labor" a la MTurk was the original idea, was it not? pretty close to the data labeling thesis.

[koakuma-chan]

> "API for human labor" a la MTurk was the original idea, was it not?

That's how spammers bypassed captcha for decades

[DebtDeflation]

I didn't mean to imply he started it alone. Though his co-founder Lucy Guo is almost as bizarre of a story as Wang himself. I'm curious, what were they doing before data labeling?

[stale2002]

> Though his co-founder Lucy Guo is almost as bizarre

Well, kind of. I went to school with Lucy, and she was a completely different person back then. Sure she was among the more social of the CS majors, but the gliz and glamour and weirdness with Lucy came after she got her fame and fortune.

I suspect a similar thing happen with Wang. When you are in charge of a billion dollar business, you tend to grow into the billion dollar CEO.

> what were they doing before data labeling?

They were building an API for mechanical turks. Think "send an api call, with the words 'call up this pizza restaurant and ask if they are open'" and then this API call would cause a human to follow the instructions and physically call the restaurant, and type back a response that is sent back to your API call.

The pivot to data labelling, as money poured into self driving cars, makes some amount of sense given their previous business idea. Is almost the same type of "API for humans" idea, except much more focussed on one specific usecase.

[arthurcolle]

Wasn't the data labeling the first thing?

[moralestapia]

With all the respect that is due, Lucy didn't do cr*p and also left quite early.

Scale is 99% Alex's credit.

[v5v3]

You should perhaps explain how you know this.

[MichaelZuo]

There are some stranger rumors too floating around.

[jazzyjackson]

This is America, if you have tea, spill it!

[MichaelZuo]

I’m nowhere near fully confident in these rumors… so there’s nothing to spill. I don’t post specific accusations without some completely reliable basis.

And I imagine that’s the norm in most places.

[andytratt]

i don't know Alex directly that well but i believe his "freshman year" skipped all GIRs and was spent polishing off the most advanced graduate courses in CS theory (18.404), machine learning (6.867), algorithms (6.854), etc.

so basically he did MIT at the PhD level in 1 year.

As a classmate myself who did it in 3, at a high level too (and I think Varun - of Windsurf - completed his undergrad in 3 years also)...

Wang's path and trajectory, thru MIT at least, is unmatched to my knowledge.

[npinsker]

That courseload is completely unremarkable for a first-year with experience in competitive programming (like Wang had). I know a dozen people who did the same.

[andytratt]

i know a dozen who come close but none who did the same, nor who had the entrepreneurial bent so early... curious who are these people you have in mind?

[npinsker]

Alexandr is just a dude, like you or me, with his own life and his own worries and his own problems. He’s more like the rest of us than you seem to think.

[andytratt]

as his former bughouse partner, i agree :)

[TrackerFF]

Not trying to diminish his academic accomplishments, but it isn't that uncommon for experienced freshman students to just jump straight into advanced topics. If you're the type that has been coding since you were 10, been active in Olympic teams, or whatever, you can probably do just fine in such courses.

If anything, you'd be bored with some undergrad courses.

[andytratt]

yes. exactly. that was me. chess analogy: Alex is Magnus, whereas I'm like Sam Shankland or something.

[andytratt]

being way too generous lol