Alexandr Wang became the world's youngest self-made billionaire. His company, Scale AI, powers OpenAI, the US Military, and probably the toaster in your kitchen.
How does it work? Is it a revolutionary new algorithm? Is it a quantum breakthrough?
No. It's humans.
The Mechanical Turk 2.0
Scale AI hires tens of thousands of people (mostly in the developing world) to label data.
- "This is a car."
- "This is a pedestrian."
- "This is hate speech."
The AI isn't smart. The humans are smart. The AI just cheats off their homework.
The "Potemkin Village"
There's a story (maybe apocryphal) about the "Mechanical Turk" chess machine in the 18th century. It beat everyone. Turns out, there was just a small chess master hiding inside the box.
Scale AI is the box. The underpaid labelers are the chess master.
Conclusion
I have nothing against Scale AI. It's a brilliant business. But let's not pretend it's "Artificial Intelligence."
It's "Outsourced Intelligence."
Next time ChatGPT writes a poem, remember: it only knows what a poem is because a human sitting in a cafe in Nairobi told it. We aren't obsolete yet. The machine still needs us to tell it which squares contain traffic lights.
