6 things I learned after spending a week writing a story about Scale AI's Alexandr Wang
Often one of the great pleasures of writing is the process of researching and crafting a story. Other times, however, it’s just a giant slog — made pleasurable mostly by the camaraderie of colleagues, some interesting conversations and the pinnacle moment of being finally f***ing finished.
I must say I felt the latter last week putting together a large feature story with my Fortune colleague Allie Garfinkle about the rise of Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang and the recent $14 billion Meta deal that led Wang to step down and join Meta to help lead a new superintelligence team (and I have heard lots of other chatter that he is being tapped to head Meta’s entire AI org).
A slog, in that I spent the entire week chasing leads and attempting to get some fresh original reporting. I feel like Allie and I were partially successful - you’ll definitely get some spicy tidbits in our piece, as well as a strong understanding of the entire arc of Wang’s career and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts. The reporter in me wanted more, but I am glad to be moving on to other stories.
A few serious, and a few half-serious, things I learned from spending a week in Wang/Zuckerberg land:
Billionaire lives are not relatable (obviously). It is very weird emailing with Scale co-founder Lucy Guo and checking that she did, in fact, receive $650 million in cash from the Meta/Scale deal and her responding that she did, in fact, receive $750 million. Oh, and spending hours trying to figure out who might confirm how many times Wang hung out with Zuck in Tahoe? It’s rough, I tell you. 😂
Things change quickly in AI-land (obviously). Nine months ago, I spent over a month working on a deep-dive story for Fortune’s Most Powerful People issue about the rise of Meta’s Llama and how Mark Zuckerberg rebuilt the entire company around its success and development. I never got Zuck to speak with me (though during the same period he had plenty of time to record and drop a raunchy remix of T-Pain’s “Get Low” as an anniversary gift to his wife), but I interviewed Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun, head of Gen AI Ahmad Al-Dahle, then-head of FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) Joelle Pineau, and then-head of global affairs Nick Clegg. Meta seemed very much on the up when it comes to AI — far from Zuckerberg’s current seemingly-desperate spending spree.
Things change quickly in AI-land, Part Two: It was just a year ago that I interviewed Wang in an exclusive piece covering the startup’s Series F round (which included participation by Meta). Wang sounded entirely devoted to serving the entire AI ecosystem and said he considered Scale’s data the tracks upon which the entire AI train runs. With the Scale acqui-hire, which has led to companies like Google and OpenAI winding down their relationships with Scale, those tracks seem to have hit a dead end.
Funny how time rewrites the script. Our Fortune feature about Wang begins with memories about a secretive Scale AI Security Summit I attended in November 2023, which ended the day before Sam Altman was fired. Thank goodness I wrote a Substack post about it, otherwise I would have remembered even less, but I wish I remembered even more. In hindsight, I really consider it a moment where Wang’s star truly began to rise, particularly in DC circles.
You have no control over the news cycle. You think you’re on top of the story—until the world reminds you otherwise. Wang’s saga was unfolding fast, Zuckerberg’s AI ambitions even faster. And then the U.S. bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. So much for competing with that!!
I’m incredibly lucky to have such amazing colleagues! If you have to spend an entire week, plus a couple of weekends, on a story, you’d better enjoy spending that time Slacking and texting and talking to your editor and co-writers. Luckily, I definitely do — Allie and my Fortune editor Alexei Oreskovic were, as usual, fantastic to work with.
Onward and upward — glad to be back on the AI story hunt.