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Comment by tim333

11 hours ago

I was just watching the Y Combinator interview with Alexandr Wang who I guess may be being referred to https://youtu.be/5noIKN8t69U

The teenage data labeler thing was a bit of an exaggeration. He did found scale.ai at nineteen which does data labeling amongst other things.

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tim333

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rhines  8 hours ago

I watched this interview when I first heard about Alexandr Wang. I'd seen he was the youngest self made billionaire, which is a pretty impressive credential to have under your belt, and I wanted to see if I could get a read on what sets him apart.

Unfortunately he doesn't reveal any particular intelligence, insight, or drive in the interview, nor does he in other videos I found. Possibly he hides it, or possibly his genius is beyond me. Or possibly he had good timing on starting a data labelling company and then leveraged his connections in SV (including being roommates with Sam Altman) to massively inflate Scale AI's valuation and snag a Meta acquisition.

  • tim333  2 hours ago

    I got the impression he's intelligent and hard working but to a large extent got lucky. I mean his idea was to kind of do a better version of Mechanical Turk which is ok as an idea but not amazing or anything. But then all these LLM companies were getting billions thrown at them by investors thinking they'd be AGI soon but they didn't work well without lots of humans doing fine tuning and Wang's company provided an outlet to throw the money at to get humans to try to do that.

    I don't know how that will go at Meta. At the moment having lots of humans tweek LLMs still seems to be the main thing at the AI companies but that could change.