Alexandr Wang

Meta's first chief AI officer

Alexandr Wang is chief AI officer of Meta Platforms and leads Meta Superintelligence Labs. Fortune reported that when Mark Zuckerberg gave him oversight of Meta's AI operations in June 2025, he became the company's first person to hold the chief AI officer title, with responsibility for a newly formed superintelligence team and for Meta's other AI product and research groups.^[1]

The appointment was tied to a deal with his own company. Capital Brief reported that Meta completed an investment of about $14.3 billion for a 49 percent, non-voting stake in Scale AI, and that Wang would join Meta to lead its superintelligence unit while staying on Scale's board.^[3]

Building Scale AI

According to Fortune, Wang co-founded Scale AI in 2016, at age 19, with Lucy Guo while the pair were in Y Combinator, after he left MIT following a year of study. The company moved into data labeling, the labor-intensive work of tagging and organizing information so models can learn from it, and became a neutral data supplier to the makers of large language models.^[1]

Forbes describes Scale as a company that helps businesses prepare raw data for AI and machine learning. In 2024 the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office gave Scale a one-year contract to build a test-and-evaluation framework for large language models used in military settings, a sign of how far the company had moved from labeling into model evaluation and government work.^[4][7]

The Meta relationship and the 2025 deal

Fortune noted that Meta had used Scale as a data provider since 2019 and invested in the company's 2024 funding round, so the 2025 transaction deepened an existing tie. Scale's own announcement said Meta's new investment valued the company at over $29 billion, that part of the proceeds would be distributed to shareholders and vested equity holders, and that Chief Strategy Officer Jason Droege, who joined in September 2024, would serve as interim chief executive.^[1][2]

Fortune quoted Zuckerberg calling Wang the most impressive founder of his generation, and described the task he inherited: reviving Meta's Llama models after the April 2025 release of Llama 4 drew criticism, deciding whether Llama should remain open source, and pursuing superintelligence, a goal with no agreed definition. The superintelligence team he leads includes Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross along with researchers recruited from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Apple.^[1]

First results: Muse Spark

On April 8, 2026, Meta unveiled Muse Spark, the first model from Superintelligence Labs, which it called the first step on its scaling ladder toward personal superintelligence. eWeek reported that the model handles voice, text and images, was trained with input from more than 1,000 physicians, and was released as a proprietary model with a private API preview for select partners rather than as open weights, though Wang has said Meta plans to open-source future versions.^[5]

The same report said independent testing by Artificial Analysis placed Muse Spark among the top five models it had tested, far above Llama 4 Maverick, while Meta itself acknowledged weaker results in coding and long-horizon agentic tasks. Those are launch-time assessments and may have been revised since.^[5]

How he runs things and what he has said publicly

In June 2024 Wang announced on Scale's blog that the company would hire on what he called merit, excellence and intelligence, saying it would pick the best person for each job and treat people as individuals rather than as members of demographic groups. Fortune reported on the post, noting that Scale declined to comment further.^[6]

In March 2026, reports circulated that Zuckerberg had sidelined Wang after Meta formed a new applied AI engineering group. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone called the reports totally false on March 9, saying Wang helped create the new team, still runs Superintelligence Labs and its TBD group, and has growing influence at the company. The claim was traced to a Times of India article that was later corrected.^[8]

Why he matters

Wang's path is unusual even by Silicon Valley standards: a founder whose first company supplied training data to the whole industry is now responsible for the model-building effort of one of its largest competitors. How Meta Superintelligence Labs performs against OpenAI, Google and Anthropic will be the clearest measure of the 2025 bet that placed him there.^[1][5]

On The Executive List

Alexandr Wang is ranked No. 19 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Executive Officers discipline. The list row predates his 2025 move from Scale AI chief executive to Meta. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.