SAN FRANCISCO (THE WASHINGTON POST) – 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 organise and label data to train AI algorithms, has been aggressively pitching itself as the company that will help the US military in its existential battle with China, offering to help the Pentagon pull better insights out of the reams of information it generates every day, build better autonomous vehicles and even create chatbots that can help advise military commanders during combat.
It scored a USD249 million contract last year to provide a range of AI tech to the Department of Defence. Scale also counts the Army, Air Force, the Marine Corps University and military truck maker Oshkosh among its individual customers.
In May, Scale became the first AI company to have a “large language model” – the tech behind chatbots such as ChatGPT – deployed on a classified network after it signed a deal with the Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps. Scale’s chatbot, known as “Donovan,” is meant to summarise intelligence and help commanders make decisions faster.
To Wang, who describes himself as a “China hawk,” the stakes are high: Without AI developed by private tech companies, the United States won’t be able to maintain its technological edge over the rising military power of China.
“Data is ultimately the ammunition of AI warfare,” he said in a recent interview, repeating a line he has used in conferences and during a congressional hearing in July. And the United States is already behind in stockpiling that ammunition, Wang said.
The US military has made AI a key part of its strategy for the coming decades, laying out plans to field autonomous ships and 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.
Scale has benefited from being ahead of the latest AI boom, triggered last year when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. Scale has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and was valued by its investors at over USD7 billion in 2021, making Wang the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the time, according to Forbes.
But competition for military contracts is fierce. Big Tech companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon are all aggressively trying to court the Pentagon. In December 2022, those three firms, plus business software company Oracle, were awarded exclusive rights to bid for USD9 billion worth of cloud computing contracts across the Defence Department, which could eat up some of what Scale is hoping to compete for. A growing group of other start-ups including Shield AI and Helsing are raising significant amounts of money and working to sell their tech to the military too.
