Alexandr Wang is the Chief AI Officer of Meta, a role he has held since June 2025, in which he leads Meta Superintelligence Labs. He previously co-founded and served as CEO of Scale AI from 2016 to 2025. Meta describes the position as the company's first Chief AI Officer (Source: https://www.meta.com/about/leadership/alexandr-wang/).
Background
Wang was born in January 1997 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the son of Chinese immigrants who worked as physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/04/11/how-alexandr-wang-turned-an-army-of-clickworkers-into-a-73-billion-ai-unicorn/). He attended Los Alamos High School and competed in mathematics and science contests as a teenager, qualifying for the Math Olympiad Program in 2013 and the United States Physics Team in 2014, and reaching the USACO (USA Computing Olympiad) finals in 2012 and 2013 (Source: https://math.unm.edu/news-events/news/alexandr-wang-former-unm-pnm-math-contest-winner-and-ceo-scale-ai-25-years-old). Before college he moved to Silicon Valley, working as a software engineer at the wealth-management firm Addepar and, during his teens, as a programmer at Quora (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandr_Wang). He briefly attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and held an internship at the high-frequency trading firm Hudson River Trading before dropping out of MIT to co-found Scale AI in 2016 (Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenli1/2019/12/22/scale-ai-growth-story/).
Wang founded Scale AI in 2016 at age 19, co-founding the company with Lucy Guo (Source: https://www.meta.com/about/leadership/alexandr-wang/) (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandr_Wang). He led the company as CEO until 2025. During his tenure, a U.S. Department of Labor investigation under the Fair Labor Standards Act examined Scale's contractor labor practices; the investigation opened in March 2025 and closed in April 2025 without action.
In 2021 Scale AI reached a valuation of $7.3 billion; Wang held about 15% of the company, and the round briefly placed his net worth above $1 billion, making him, at age 24, the youngest self-made billionaire reported at the time (Source: https://www.forbesmiddleeast.com/innovation/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning/how-alexandr-wang-turned-an-army-of-clickworkers-into-a-$73-billion-ai-unicorn) (Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/scale-ais-rapid-growth-reflects-widening-demand-for-smart-software-11626082201). Forbes estimated his net worth at about $3.6 billion as of April 2025 (Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2025/04/17/this-ai-founder-lucy-guo-scale-ai-has-unseated-taylor-swift-as-the-worlds-youngest-self-made-woman-billionaire/). Under his leadership Scale AI grew to a valuation of nearly $29 billion, according to Meta (Source: https://www.meta.com/about/leadership/alexandr-wang/).
During his time at Scale AI, Wang took on outside roles and engagement with government. He joined the board of Expedia Group in 2023 (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandr_Wang). In July 2023 he testified before a U.S. House Armed Services subcommittee on the challenges the U.S. government faced in adopting AI (Source: https://defensescoop.com/2023/07/18/in-wake-of-project-maven-pentagon-urged-to-launch-new-pathfinder-initiatives-to-accelerate-ai/). Scale AI received defense contracts from U.S. armed forces and was selected by the Department of Defense's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office to test and evaluate large language models for military planning and decision-making (Source: https://defensescoop.com/2024/02/20/scale-ai-pentagon-testing-evaluating-large-language-models/).
Roles
Wang moved from Scale AI to Meta in June 2025. On June 10, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta Superintelligence Labs. On June 12, 2025, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and recruited Wang as Chief AI Officer through an acquihire structure that preserved Scale AI as an independent entity. Reporting on the transaction described Meta acquiring a 49% stake in Scale AI, with Wang stepping down as Scale's CEO while remaining on its board (Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/12/technology/meta-scale-ai.html) (Source: https://www.ft.com/content/64e937b0-0d52-4a04-aa7b-06b9c2ae971e). By June 30, 2025, Wang was leading Meta Superintelligence Labs alongside an announced expansion of its talent base. As part of the recruiting effort he led, Meta hired Apple's Ruoming Pang on July 9, 2025 with a compensation package reported at more than $200 million.
Wang is the youngest person to hold the Chief AI Officer role at a large technology company, with budget authority over Meta's AI spending. Meta states that as Chief AI Officer he plays a role in shaping the company's AI strategy and initiatives (Source: https://www.meta.com/about/leadership/alexandr-wang/).
Positions and statements
In March 2025, Wang co-authored "Superintelligence Strategy" with Dan Hendrycks and Eric Schmidt, a document advancing a Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM) deterrence framework. See Superintelligence Strategy (Hendrycks, Schmidt, Wang). His association with that paper places him in safety-oriented policy discourse, alongside his subsequent appointment at Meta, where the company's AI direction is product-oriented.
Wang has publicly framed AI development as a competition between the United States and China. In January 2025 he was among the technology founders and chief executives present at the second inauguration of Donald Trump, and he published a letter addressed to President Trump arguing that "America must win the AI war" (Source: https://www.semafor.com/article/01/20/2025/scale-ai-ceo-alexandr-wang-to-trump-america-must-win-the-ai-war) (Source: https://www.inc.com/sam-blum/scale-ai-ceo-alexandr-wang-writes-letter-to-president-trump-america-must-win-the-ai-war/91109901). Later that month, at the World Economic Forum, he said that China had quickly narrowed the gap with the United States, pointing to the capabilities of the open-source model from DeepSeek (Source: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/business/money-report/scale-ai-ceo-says-china-has-quickly-caught-the-u-s-with-the-deepseek-open-source-model/3613234/). In February 2025 he met with several heads of government and officials, including UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, French President Emmanuel Macron, and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, on the subject of international cooperation on AI (Source: https://www.axios.com/2025/02/12/scale-ai-uk-us-policy-regulation) (Source: https://www.inc.com/sam-blum/scale-ai-ceo-meets-house-speaker-mike-johnson/91144107).
In June 2024, Wang announced that Scale AI had adopted a "merit, excellence, and intelligence" (MEI) hiring policy, stating that people should be judged by their character and, as colleagues, by their talent, skills, and work ethic. The policy was described as an alternative to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring approaches (Source: https://www.foxbusiness.com/fox-news-tech/scale-ai-ceo-explains-why-his-company-hire-mei-not-dei-merit-excellence-intelligence).
Recognition
Wang was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Enterprise Technology category in 2018 (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandr_Wang). He was also included on Time's Time 100 Next list and on the Time 100 AI list in 2023 (Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20250612191055/https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6310631/alexandr-wang/).
Relationships
- leads: Meta Superintelligence Labs
- founded: Scale AI
- co-authored: Superintelligence Strategy (Hendrycks, Schmidt, Wang)
- related: Mark Zuckerberg (Meta CEO), Dan Hendrycks (Superintelligence Strategy co-author), Eric Schmidt.