Alexandr Wang
Scale AI co-founder, now leading Meta's Superintelligence Labs through its 8,000-engineer restructuring.
Last refreshed: 23 April 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
With 8,000 engineers cut, is Alexandr Wang building Meta's AI future or rationalising its past?
Timeline for Alexandr Wang
Led Superintelligence Labs division absorbing all Meta business units
AI: Jobs, Power & Money: Meta codes its own org chart- Who is Alexandr Wang and what does he do at Meta?
- Wang is the co-founder of Scale AI who joined Meta in 2025 to lead Superintelligence Labs, overseeing a reorganisation that cut 8,000 engineering roles.Source: Meta internal memo, April 2026
- What happened to Scale AI after Alexandr Wang joined Meta?
- Wang departed Scale AI's day-to-day leadership when he joined Meta in 2025. Scale AI retains its DoD contracts and labelling business independently.
- How old is Alexandr Wang?
- Born in 1997, Wang is 28 years old as of 2026. He founded Scale AI at 19.
Background
Alexandr Wang joined Meta in early 2025 as head of its newly formed Superintelligence Labs, the AI-native reorganisation that absorbed all of Meta's engineering divisions. The structural shift, announced via a 14 April 2026 internal memo, included the elimination of approximately 8,000 engineering roles — 10% of the engineering workforce — alongside the introduction of three new job titles replacing traditional engineering designations. Wang is the most prominent figure associated with Meta's stated ambition to become the dominant AGI-era platform company.
Wang co-founded Scale AI in 2016, aged 19, dropping out of MIT. Scale AI became the data-labelling infrastructure underpinning most major US AI foundation models, including those at OpenAI, Anthropic, and the US Department of Defence. By 2024, Scale AI was valued at approximately $14bn with annual revenues in the region of $1bn, driven largely by government contracts including a multiyear DoD AI training data agreement. Wang's public profile made him one of the most visible advocates for accelerationist AI development and against federal AI regulation.
Wang's move to Meta marked a significant consolidation of AI talent in a single hyperscaler. His position at Meta is significant both for what he brings — Scale AI's data-infrastructure expertise and his credibility with the AI-safety-sceptic wing of the industry — and for what it signals about Meta's trajectory as it competes with OpenAI and Google on frontier model development.