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.
Scale is 99% Alex's credit.
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.
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.
That's how spammers bypassed captcha for decades
And I imagine that’s the norm in most places.
so basically he did MIT at the PhD level in 1 year.
As a classmate myself who did it in 3, at a high level too (and I think Varun - of Windsurf - completed his undergrad in 3 years also)...
Wang's path and trajectory, thru MIT at least, is unmatched to my knowledge.
If anything, you'd be bored with some undergrad courses.