Scale AI Review: The Data Labeling Giant That Became America's Defense AI Infrastructure

Alexandr Wang dropped out of MIT at 19, built a $29B data labeling empire, then handed the keys to Meta for $14.3B while heading to run superintelligence research. Scale AI went from RLHF supplier to every major AI lab to the Pentagon's preferred AI data contractor — with a $500M defense deal just awarded. Here is how they got there and what it costs them.