Alexandr Wang, Meta’s AI wunderkind

Tasked with briefing Meta executives on the progress of the company’s make-or-break AI bet late last year, Alexandr Wang opted to present a detail-light “vibe report”.

The meeting did little to reassure finance chief Susan Li. “If this doesn’t work, this is going to be . . . very, very bad in financial terms,” Li said, according to an account of the conversation given by Wang during a podcast interview this week.

On Monday, Wang was able to offer Li and everyone else clear evidence that the multibillion-dollar push is working: with the launch of Meta’s new Muse Wonder AI model lifting Meta’s stock, and Wang’s with it. The 29-year-old head of Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, whose big-money hiring — through a $14.3bn transaction involving his data-labelling company Scale AI — raised eyebrows last year, is being feted as the man who has put Meta back in the AI race.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, the release of Muse Wonder has returned Meta to the “frontier” of AI. It comes just five weeks after Meta’s new Muse AI agent achieved a viral take-off that led it to become the most downloaded free app in Apple and Android app stores. On Thursday, Wang also announced that Meta would partner with Apple to deploy Meta’s open-weight AI models on Mac computers.

The mullet-haired, T-shirt and Crocs-wearing billionaire has emerged from development wilderness into the limelight and is basking in the praise.

Wang, who grew up in New Mexico and is the son of two Chinese-American physicists, was a maths prodigy who graduated high school a year early and moved to Silicon Valley, where he worked for question-and-answer site Quora. At 18 he enrolled at MIT but dropped out a year later to found Scale AI in 2016. The start-up, which supplies curated and labelled data used to train AI models, signed deals with the likes of Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Dario Amodei’s Anthropic.

“Alex is not just smart and technical but thoughtful in his analysis and communication style, which goes way beyond his years,” said Mike Volpi, an early Scale investor and partner at early-stage venture capital firm Hanabi Capital. “He’s precocious and mature beyond his age.”

Wang is well connected across the tech sector (Altman is a former flatmate). Scale signed its first contract with Facebook in 2019 and Wang met Zuckerberg two years later. But the relationship shifted radically last year after the social media giant released an underwhelming new AI model, leading Zuckerberg to overhaul Meta’s AI team structure and leadership.

The pair entered talks around a potential deal to bring the Scale AI founder to Meta in early 2025, meeting at Zuckerberg’s homes in Tahoe and Palo Alto over several months, according to people familiar with the matter. Together they set out a year-long roadmap to return the company to the AI frontier, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Wang is considered “an operator” who can speak the language of AI engineers, according to those close to him. However, upon joining Meta as chief AI officer, he faced pressure both internally and externally, having never worked on training an AI model. His early months in charge were spent triggering a talent war in Silicon Valley, poaching star researchers from rivals. The first few models released under his leadership did not keep pace with rivals.

“There were a lot of entrenched interests but people knew to make way because he had all of Mark’s attention and support,” said one former Meta executive.

Anastasios Angelopoulos, chief executive of Arena, an open platform for evaluating AI models, said that Meta had made significant progress under Wang’s direction. “It’s not as good as the models from Anthropic and OpenAI yet. But the strides are massive,” he said. “That’s all Alex.”

One person who has worked with both Wang and Zuckerberg said that the former reminded them of a younger version of the Meta chief, though free of the scars that have come from frequent fights with regulators and unflattering Hollywood blockbusters.

“Mark is much more cynical in his outlook, his relevance and place in pop culture,” they said. “Alex hasn’t weathered as many storms.”

Scale was embroiled in several controversies during Wang’s tenure, including a lawsuit alleging it required staff to evaluate extreme material as part of the company’s data labelling work. The case was later voluntarily dismissed. Wang further clashed with co-founder Lucy Guo, whom he fired in 2018.

But close associates believe the infancy of AI has thus far shielded Wang from high-profile upsets, leaving him with a relaxed public profile. Some of his frequent posts on social media site X poke fun at Meta, including risqué images and videos of the Muse mascot Jolly. “Somehow the corposlops refused to use my video,” he wrote.

Zuckerberg has maintained that Wang is the right person to lead Meta’s AI effort, referring to him as “the fucking guy” and affording him latitude that few in the company possess. Wang is already being touted as a potential successor to Zuckerberg. “He has sometimes viewed himself as a second-class citizen in the AI space,” said one person who used to work with him. “Now he’s getting to prove he’s in the same league as Sam, Dario and the others.”

Additional reporting by Cristina Criddle and George Hammond

rafe.uddin@ft.com