No Priors Ep. 65 | With Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang

Alexandr Wang was 19 when he realized that gathering data will be crucial as AI becomes more prevalent, so he dropped out of MIT and started Scale AI. This week on No Priors, Alexandr joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how Scale is providing infrastructure and building a robust data foundry that is crucial to the future of AI. While the company started working with autonomous vehicles, they’ve expanded by partnering with research labs and even the U.S. government.

In this episode, they get into the importance of data quality in building trust in AI systems and a possible future where we can build better self-improvement loops, AI in the enterprise, and where human and AI intelligence will work together to produce better outcomes.

Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @alexandr_wang

0:00 Introduction
3:01 Data infrastructure for autonomous vehicles
5:51 Data abundance and organization
12:06 Data quality and collection
15:34 The role of human expertise
20:18 Building trust in AI systems
23:28 Evaluating AI models
29:59 AI and government contracts
32:21 Multi-modality and scaling challenges

[rioiart]

Refreshing to listen to a meaningful discussion focusing on the data the AI models are trained and refined on.

[rubyocean]

It's nice to see so much transparency. I think this would be a good video for the Remotasks community to see. I'm thankful I saw this video. Thank you!

[textileheavenK]

He’s accomplished so much!! I’d be interested in another interview with Alex focusing on how his corporation values and cares about its workers!

[TheCanadianObama]

I've been theorizing with friends that post-scarcity, post-AGI societies will be more about deeper evolutionary needs and their associated problems, while AI will handle everything else. This CEO's idea that the model's ability to "optimize for amorphous goals over exceedingly long time horizions" is a fundamental limitation seems in line with my evolution theory. We can't re-create the exact pressures that developed human intelligence (i.e. evolution over millenia), so it makes sense that we will never create something artificial that captures all of this context.

AI will do a shit ton, but not *everything*.

[cjb]

I respect Alex for winning, but the founding story of Scale AI is total BS in this video. He was a freshman at MIT in his first semester, he wasn’t working on AI yet. He got into YC with an app like Zocdoc then pivoted into Scale. This whole ‘wow you had so much foresight’ is a load of BS

[SelfishGene]

Alex is clearly not very bright (or maybe just too young?)

Elad clearly understands this, but cannot say it out loud

[BadWithNames]

well this was a waste of time..
openai cofounder already said ai will automate his job away in 5 years. so good luck to you if you think humans + ai will beat ai alone

[luciususiholo]

Bet they smashed when he was in her house