Mark Zuckerberg is betting over $14 billion, and is betting that the 28-year-old is the catalyst needed to catch up with rival races to develop and commercialize artificial intelligence.
Metachief bought a 49% data labeling business scale AI last week and signed a deal to hire its leader, Alexandre Wang. Zuckerberg paid $14.3 billion, slightly above the scale’s final rating. However, according to investors of a certain size, ownership of a startup is “basically contingent.” The real prize was King.
One of Meta’s biggest rivals, executives said the move came when Meta was behind the AI rivals after Zuckerberg determined that King was the necessary “wartime CEO” at the heart of the major tech group’s “super intelligence” lab.
Wang, the child of two Chinese physicists who co-founded the mathematics genius and the 19-year-old scale, is neither a well-known AI researcher nor a top engineer.
According to dozens who worked with Wang or invested in the size, he is a very effective operator with close ties to Silicon Valley.
“There are few companies that have a deep relationship with all the top research teams. They have scale and Nvidia, and (Nvidia boss) Jensen (Huang) probably won’t take on the job.”
Zuckerberg hopes Wang’s star power will draw the best talent from rivals such as Openai, Anthropic, Google, and Safe Superintelligence (SSI).
According to anyone with knowledge of the issue, Meta is discussing hiring one of SSI’s co-founders, Dan Gross, and his investment partner, Nat Friedman. The discussion first reported by the information is a sophisticated stage, and poaching the pair represents a coup in the improved AI sector of the meta.
Gross and Friedman did not respond to requests for comment.
According to several people who worked with him, the King’s real gift is his ability to grow strong allies in both Silicon Valley and beyond. His social calendar is scattered with meetings with world leaders such as Kiel’s Starge, Emmanuel Macron and Narendra Modi, along with trips to the Met Gala and Formula 1 races in New York.
His confidants include Openai Chief and one-time housemate Sam Altman, former chief technology officer of chat makers Mira Murati, and Michael Krazios, technology advisor to President Donald Trump.
According to those familiar with the issue, Wang has idolized Zuckerberg for a long time, but added that Scale was an early Facebook investor from Accel, so he was seeking venture funds from Accel.
For those who joked that for large staff, it would take years for the company to open up because of its high ratings, the deal represents a welcome wind drop. The staff on Meta’s Generation AI team are less impressed, citing doubts about Wang’s technical capabilities, according to people close to the company.
Meta is far from a neutral broker in AI races, and King’s ability to attract favors may be short-lived. His new posts have caused him to fall into a war for talent with Altman and Murati who founded her own AI startup last year called Thinking Machines.
Altman said this week that Meta had tried to poach the open developers with a $100 million sign-on bonus and even higher wages.
Large spending on new employees acknowledges that Meta’s existing AI strategy was stud.
The company’s latest release, the Llama 4, was overwhelmed by many independent performance benchmarks. The title of Wang and its relationship with Yann Lecun, a computer scientist who leads Meta’s basic AI research efforts, has yet to be determined, according to the company.
“This is a big bet. Most importantly, the research team they gather quickly,” said someone close to the scale. “They have made incredible offers and are trying to hire a talented team as quickly as possible. Alex knows all these people.
Others who know the King see opportunism behind the merciless network building. “The King is an operator. I want to make as much money as possible and create as big a name as possible,” the former employee said.
“He wants his name for everything, even when he’s not over or is not at work,” said another who worked closely with Wang on many projects.
Scale competes for its characterization and describes the king as hardworking and conscientious.
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On a large scale, the king proved his mastery of reading markets and political winds. The startup initially focused on serving self-driving car training companies before pivoting in 2019, before focusing on artificial intelligence. It quickly became most prominent among the groups of companies doing the unattractive work of labeling and classifying the data used to train AI tools such as Openai’s ChatGPT.
That includes hiring many “gig” workers in developing countries through subsidiaries known as remotes. Recently, we trained and tested models in highly specialized domains using subject experts.
On scale, most of the company’s “contributors” are currently based in the US.
Scale pursued new business with the US government and helped businesses build AI applications. The business is growing rapidly, according to people close to scale, but the majority of last year’s revenues are from labeling data from the largest generation AI companies, including Meta.
“Alex never gets satisfied with his team, nor is he satisfied with himself. When I met him at age 19, I realized his intelligence, but missed out on his relentless drive,” said an early investor in Scale.
Wang also became a trusted messenger in Washington, DC thanks to his clever policy stance, including China’s extreme Hawkishness and the advocacy of “met-based” employment over diversity.
The fate of the scale is now unknown. New CEO Jason Doroge said the meta deal, which valued at $29 billion, examined the company’s approach and “is not a pivot or a winding up.”
“We have an exceptional team, a clear vision and resources to achieve something truly amazing,” he said.
In the short term, we are fighting to retain our biggest customers and reassuring that our data will be called out by Meta. Openai and Google have already shown they are leaving the service of scale.
“The business of scale is going to collapse. No one wants to work with a company with Meta owning 49%, so (meta) investors had to pay for what they valued the whole company in the final round,” said one startup supporter.
Scale added that the company’s relationship with key customers remains strong, and that Meta’s investments show that the rest of the business is genuinely valuable. Openai said the company has been in the process of reducing its size over the last few months. Google declined to comment.
Those close to the company were even more bullish about the future of a kingless scale. “Our customers can’t really leave us,” the person said. “We are at war and (on scale) we are arms dealers.”
Additional Reports by Stephen Morris of San Francisco
