The main character of the unicorn that is drawing attention in Silicon Valley these days is a 22-year-old young man named Alexander Wang. The young man founded Scale AI, a startup that cuts the simple labor of tags from hours to minutes with genius coding. The company has led to an investment of 100 million dollars.
Both of Alexander Wang’s parents were from New Mexico, both majored in physics, and he also excelled in coding competitions and had already received offers for employment while in high school. Wang, who entered MIT College of Engineering, but after dropping out, joined the social media Quora, founded Scale AI in San Francisco at the age of 19 and became CEO. Now 22, he has finished procuring Series C, with an valuation of over $1 billion.
Scale AI customers include Google’s autonomous driving developer Waymo, GM’s autonomous driving developer Cruise, and vehicle sharing companies Uber and Rift. The plan to expand the know-how gained in these autonomous driving industries to all industries was evaluated, and large investments were added. Standard Cognition, Airbnb, and Neuro, which are unmanned store services, have already been listed on the new customer list.
When a customer developer sends content such as audio, video, and photos to Scale AI through API, it sorts and classifies through automatic processing, and returns it through quality inspection by human resources. It makes it easy for companies that can’t afford AI to integrate machine learning into their systems. For example, in an unmanned store, if surveillance data is transmitted through a surveillance camera, Scale AI handles the part that the customer identifies the product brand and contents in the basket.
Of course, it’s not that there aren’t any companies that do something similar. Amazon has its own cloud service, and Uber acquired Mighty AI in June. There are also places like Hive and Alegion that claim the world’s largest data sets.
However, since there is a lot of data to be processed for labeling, Hive is outsourcing the simple task of labeling 60,000 people and Scale AI 30,000 people. Although there is a tendency to criticize the industrial structure prepared by such blue-colored heavy labor as the shadow of the Silicon Valley AI industry, Alexander Wang said that he will aim to save labor costs and is paying 60 to 70% of the market wage. Related information can be found here .