The New Youngest Self-Made Billionaire In The World Is A 25-Year-Old College Dropout | Forbes

[Music] when you know in math and science and physics and you know these fields there's always a right answer you're either you're right or you're wrong and i actually think that teaches you some of the wrong lessons [Music] i remember really vividly some of my early violin lessons where you can get all the notes right but that actually isn't what mattered what mattered is that you could weave through the notes the emotion and the story that the original composer was trying to to convey and i think that was it was really powerful lesson because i think you know one thing that many of us learn over time is that a lot of times it's not about something being clinically correct or clinically right or exactly right it's about how they kind of make people feel and i think that that definitely is true in technology and it's definitely true in everything that we try to build my name is alexander wang i'm the ceo and founder of scale ai scale ai is the data infrastructure for ai to power the most ambitious ai projects in the world every organization wants to implement ai but oftentimes the the biggest bottleneck in their way is being able to create really high quality data and data sets to power that ai at scale we sort of view data as the the core problem of building great ai whereas a lot of other companies view it as an afterthought and that really prevents ai from having sort of the magnitude of outcomes that it's able to have we've raised over 600 million dollars to date and we work with everywhere from the largest automakers in the world like toyota and general motors to the united states department of defense to some of the largest enterprises in the world like microsoft square and paypal and some of the leading ai research organizations like openai when you learn how to program for the first time it's it's kind of shocking but you actually are generally sort of telling the computer to do very simple things the art of programming traditionally is the art of sort of giving computers very black and white instructions very simple instructions that anybody could follow and one of the the beauties of ai is that you actually have the ability to program computers with judgment and with reasoning and with sort of nuanced understanding of the world and so you can have an ai system look at an image and tell you what's in the image or listen to an audio snippet and understand what's being said and it is sort of this incredible enabler for what computers can do or the power of computing and in general i think we've already seen sort of over the past many decades what the power of computers and computing and mobile phones and all that stuff has been on humanity and i think ai and machine learning has a huge opportunity to do the same both my parents are physicists and i grew up in the small town in new mexico called los alamos new mexico where there's a national lab and a lot of the people i grew up with had parents who were scientists of some sort it was a sort of very special place and my mom from very young age taught me about math and physics and science and you know she taught me with such wonders i was really impatient as a kid i think i always wanted to be learning more or i always want to be doing more always wanted to sort of be accomplishing more and so i actually uh i left high school after my junior year of high school and then moved out to silicon valley to work as a software engineer i learned so much about building products about about what it meant to sort of like be metrics focused and data focused and what it sort of meant to build great software and then uh that's when i was inspired by ai i sort of saw it in my daily work i was like ai's really cool and i went back to mit and then after about a year of mit i dropped out to start scale we have over 500 people now so um it's it's pretty insane to watch you know what originally started as a you know few people in a in the basement of our investor to what it's what it's sort of become where we started was uh in autonomous vehicles and self-driving and i think it was one of the first real use cases and applications of ai that i think caught the imagination of the world you know what if we could have unlimited easy uh eco-friendly transportation everywhere in the world uh through autonomous vehicles one of the examples that we get really excited about is in healthcare in healthcare there's a huge bottleneck in the number of doctors trained doctors all around the world and there's incredible potential for ai and machine learning to actually analyze as many of the cases as possible automatically before needing escalation to a doctor so the doctors can spend their time on cases with anomalies or erratic data or whatnot and so at scale we actually did research with mit on using ai and machine learning to analyze dermatology uh data and dermatology imaging to see how ai can actually automate that process and then therefore unblock the sort of doctor bottleneck another use case that that i'm really passionate about is using ai to help solve some of the largest geopolitical problems and working with governments in being able to sort of provide technology to aid in some of these very tough and tricky situations in the war with russian ukraine we actually deployed scales technology in understanding satellite imagery of major ukrainian cities uh kharkiv kiev and nipro to understand what was the amount of damage in key parts of these cities and so we we analyzed using machine learning as well as satellite imagery and identified uh all sorts of structures in these cities where there was meaningful damage that wasn't otherwise uh being addressed or captured by humanitarian efforts and so i'm incredibly excited by our work there and actually enabling sort of humanitarian efforts enabling us to respond to some of the world's most pressing and exigent problems in the world of ai there's i think a lot of very smart people but who are focused you know so far out in the future that it's almost unhelpful you know there's so many people focused on what's going to happen when we have agi or what's going to happen you know two or three decades in the future and i think there's not enough people who are really focused on what are the problems that we have today and how can we use artificial intelligence and machine learning to really changed the game today and so um i think what's next for us is to be the people some of the people hopefully in the world who are focused on how do we solve some of the biggest problems today around climate around agriculture around geopolitics around medicine and really start making an impact you know now [Music] you

Channel: Forbes

Views: 3,166,334

Keywords: Forbes, Forbes Media, Forbes Magazine, Forbes Digital, Business, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Technology, Investing, Personal Finance, alexandr wang, scale ai, billionaire, worlds youngest self made billionaire, billionaires, rich, richest, youngest, best, what is scale ai, interview with alexandr wang, who is alexandr wang, flexport, billions, government, russia, military, contracts, under 30, 30 under 30, AI, artificial intelligence, war, GM Cruise, Alphabet, Uber, P&G, clients, billion dollar, company

Id: FgzyLoSkL5k

Length: 6min 51sec (411 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 12 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Acceptable_Setting]

While it is impressive for an AM to have that 'youngest label', realise that to get to be that rich on paper you have to offer something which the establishment, which someone noted was the US arms industry, would use to their benefit and so whether he is seen as a role model is questionable.

One of his former co workers or founders, Lucy Guo who is getting rich from her stocks, is hanging out and sitting, literally, on WM's laps whilst people like Alexandr and other countless AM engineers are likely working long hours on the startup.

[u/Atreyu1002]

Ahem. Alexandr.

[u/SithQueenGigi]

Wow big moves! Awesome.

[u/bockcui]

No, this guy works for the MIC, designing weapons that will ultimately be used against other asians. He is helping maintain imperialist hegemony and thus deserves no respect.

[u/Emperor_Hideyoshi]

Big Ups!!!

[u/martellthacool]

Congrats 👏🎉

[u/creemeleighton]

he is a man in the making since he was a child, with equally intelligent parents. Very impressive.

[u/LoneSoloist]

Dude also looks good. But unfortunately, he will never be as popular or as big as those White billionaires because hes not white.