Alexandr Wang co-founded Scale AI, a business that assists in training artificial intelligence models, and at the age of 24, he became a billionaire.
He was born in Los Alamos in 1997 and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after showing a natural gift for coding. He soon left to work in commodities trading as an algorithm developer, where he witnessed the enormous volume of data that artificial intelligence could process.
He co-founded Scale AI in 2016 with only 19 years old. And in just five years, the company had established itself as a major player in the AI training market, working with OpenAI and Meta as well as clients in the US public sector.
Wang’s advice to young people is to practice daily and learn how to communicate with machines.
He also supports theories by Malcolm Gladwell and Andrew Ng of Google Brain which support that spending hours of focused time with the best resources can be beneficial. According to Wang, “You just have to know how to make the most of the tools. It’s impossible to underestimate how radically I’ve become with AI programming.”
Alexandr Wang: From Los Alamos to Scale AI
Growing up in a scientific environment in Los Alamos, Wang found a passion for programming and enrolled at MIT. His time in college was brief because he wanted to use code to solve practical issues. He witnessed how artificial intelligence could get value from unstructured data in a trading company. He co-founded Scale AI in 2016 as a result of that realization.
The business developed software for managing and preparing data for AI system training. A few years later, Scale was collaborating with OpenAI and Meta, showing the importance of paying close attention to data quality and technology.
He recommends becoming competent with the current AI tools; coding assistants like Qodo, GitHub Copilot, and Tabnine, which accelerate formatting and bug fixing so that people can give more time to logic and design.
In a recent interview on the TBPN podcast he talked about how the winners will be those who can “tell a computer exactly what you want—and then have it do it for you.” He attributes this to Andrew Ng of Google Brain.
Practice, tools, and a new perspective on “10,000 hours”
Coding now means guiding correctly artificial intelligence rather than doing everything by hand. He transforms Malcolm Gladwell‘s well-known “10,000 hours” concept for the age of AI: “It’s actually, in a way, this incredible moment of discontinuity where if you spend 10,000 hours playing with tools and figuring out how to use them better than other people, that’s a huge advantage.”
For beginners and teenagers, that means choosing a small project (like a game, website, or data script), using AI assistants to draft code, reading the tool’s recommendations, and then fine-tuning it. Do it again, and again. In order to get exactly what you want from the machine, you gradually learn how to check results, what to ask, and how to make prompts better.
Wang believes that, “In the next five years, an AI model will be able to produce all the code I’ve ever written.” That isn’t a threat to him. Since AI removes the initial barriers and let students create real items sooner, he sees it as an opportunity for more people to enter the field.
A well-defined strategy for the AI era
Wang’s plan is easy for beginners and teenagers to follow: get started right away, practice every day, and develop good communication skills with artificial intelligence.
According to Wang, greatness is achieved with concentrated effort and the correct resources, not by magic. That’s good news for a generation that grew up with artificial intelligence. You only need curiosity to start.