Scale AI’s Wang Brings to Meta Knowledge of What Everyone Else is Doing

Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang is such an enthusiastic networker that his former roommate — OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman — once jokingly told him to tone it down a bit.

Fortunately for Wang, he ignored the advice. Last week, the 28-year-old parlayed his ability to cultivate influential relationships into a $14.3 billion investment from Meta in Scale, and a new job for himself in Meta’s “superintelligence” group, reporting to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. His own cash and equity in the deal is worth more than $5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. What Meta is buying: the one guy who knows what everyone else in the AI industry is doing.