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> Dropped out of MIT after freshman year and starts Scale to do data labeling I was in their YC batch, so two notes: 1. He didn't start it himself 2. They wer
by tyre 1y ago
> Dropped out of MIT after freshman year and starts Scale to do data labeling
I was in their YC batch, so two notes:
1. He didn't start it himself
2. They weren't doing data labeling when they entered YC. They pivoted to this.
- DebtDeflation 1y agoI didn't mean to imply he started it alone. Though his co-founder Lucy Guo is almost as bizarre of a story as Wang himself. I'm curious, what were they doing before data labeling?
- moralestapia 1y agoWith all the respect that is due, Lucy didn't do cr*p and also left quite early. Scale is 99% Alex's credit.
- v5v3 1y agoYou should perhaps explain how you know this.
- stale2002 1y ago> Though his co-founder Lucy Guo is almost as bizarre Well, kind of. I went to school with Lucy, and she was a completely different person back then. Sure she was among the more social of the CS majors, but the gliz and glamour and weirdness with Lucy came after she got her fame and fortune. I suspect a similar thing happen with Wang. When you are in charge of a billion dollar business, you tend to grow into the billion dollar CEO. > what were they doing before data labeling? They were building an API for mechanical turks. Think "send an api call, with the words 'call up this pizza restaurant and ask if they are open'" and then this API call would cause a human to follow the instructions and physically call the restaurant, and type back a response that is sent back to your API call. The pivot to data labelling, as money poured into self driving cars, makes some amount of sense given their previous business idea. Is almost the same type of "API for humans" idea, except much more focussed on one specific usecase.
- arthurcolle 1y agoWasn't the data labeling the first thing?
- andytratt 1y agonor did he finish it himself. the Scale team has always been extremely talent-dense. but execution is everything, and Alex has certainly been the dictator executing without peer or co-leads for over half a decade now. "API for human labor" a la MTurk was the original idea, was it not? pretty close to the data labeling thesis.
- koakuma-chan 1y ago> "API for human labor" a la MTurk was the original idea, was it not? That's how spammers bypassed captcha for decades
- MichaelZuo 1y agoThere are some stranger rumors too floating around.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoThis is America, if you have tea, spill it!
- MichaelZuo 1y agoI’m nowhere near fully confident in these rumors… so there’s nothing to spill. I don’t post specific accusations without some completely reliable basis. And I imagine that’s the norm in most places.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]