Corner

None of that matters in Silicon Valley and D.C., where he’s already a power player. His rise began with a bet he made in 2016 to “label” the mass of data required to power AI, primarily for self-driving cars. Someone needed to train the AI to know the difference between a paper bag and a pedestrian. He cornered that market and put Scale in a good position in another sector: generative AI. It was a prescient move that helped him garner a client list that includes the biggest names in AI—and the U.S. government.

“We’re the picks and shovels in the generative AI gold rush,” he says. It has quickly become a lucrative business for Scale, which says it pulled in $250 million in revenue last year, at a time when many AI startups aren’t yet making a cent. Its tech has been used by the Defense Department to analyze satellite imagery in Ukraine and by OpenAI to create ChatGPT, the bot that rocked the world with its ability to answer trivia and write poetry. Bret Taylor, former co-CEO of cloud software giant Salesforce, likens Scale’s rise to that of cloud computing darlings Snow- flake and Datadog. Former Amazon consumer boss Jeff Wilke, one of Wang’s most trusted advisors, takes an even more enthusiastic view: Scale could become the Amazon Web Services of AI.