The tech startup says the United States needs Silicon Valley to compete with China. Others fear a deadly arms race.
SAN FRANCISCO — Alexandr Wang grew up in the shadow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory — the birthplace of the nuclear bomb. Now, the 26-year-old CEO of artificial intelligence company ScaleAI intends to play a key role in the next major age of geopolitical conflict.Scale, which was co-founded by Wang in 2016 to help other companies organize and label data to train AI algorithms, has been aggressively pitching itself as the company that will help the U.S.
The U.S. military has made AI a key part of its strategy for the coming decades, laying out plans to fieldand planes to back up human-piloted machines, use algorithms to improve logistics by predicting when certain parts should be replaced, and scanning drone footage with image-recognition tech to free up human analysts.
Wang didn’t set out to become a military contractor. He founded Scale after dropping out of MIT at age 19 with Lucy Guo, a fellow intern at the question-and-answer site Quora. At the time, breakthroughs in AI research were leading to algorithms that could detect images and seamlessly translate language. But the reams of images and videos AI labs were pulling off the web to train their data needed to be labeled to help teach the algorithms what they were looking at.
“As with each arms race, each side’s arming of itself is justified by the other’s arming of themselves,” said Lucy Suchman, a retired professor from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom who researches how AI is used by militaries. “It’s a self-perpetuating and self-intensifying cycle.” In 2022, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon spent a combined $198.9 billion on research and development, while the Pentagon spent $132 billion, including on testing and evaluating new weapons and tools.
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