In a world where technological advancements are racing ahead, the competition between the U.S. and China in the field of artificial intelligence (A.I.) is heating up. Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old CEO of Scale AI, a $13 billion startup, recently sounded the alarm about China’s latest A.I. model released by DeepSeek, a Chinese startup. According to Wang, this “earth-shattering” development poses a significant challenge to the U.S.’s long-standing A.I. superiority.
DeepSeek’s rapid progress has not gone unnoticed, with their latest A.I. model showcasing reasoning capabilities comparable to leading U.S. companies like OpenAI. This has sparked debates about the effectiveness of A.I. chip export controls aimed at limiting China’s access to cutting-edge GPUs that power A.I. technologies.
Highlighting the gravity of the situation, Wang emphasized, “The A.I. race and the A.I. war between the U.S. and China are among the most critical issues of our time.” In a bold move, he took out a full-page advertisement in The Washington Post, urging the Trump administration to protect America’s technological edge against China’s advancing A.I. models. Wang proposed investing in computing power, data infrastructure, and an energy strategy to support the A.I. revolution.
Wang’s journey to becoming one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires is as intriguing as his insights on A.I. Born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and raised by parents who were weapons physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Wang entered the tech industry after working briefly at Addepar and Quora. His passion for machine learning led him to MIT before founding Scale AI, a company specializing in providing meticulously labeled data for A.I. training through contract work.
With a valuation of $13.8 billion and clients like the U.S. Department of Defense and OpenAI, Scale AI has solidified its position in the A.I. landscape. Wang’s close ties with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whom he roomed with during the Covid-19 pandemic, have played a crucial role in Scale AI’s success. The company was nurtured within Y Combinator, the startup accelerator once led by Altman.
The recent collaboration between Scale AI and the Center for A.I. Safety resulted in the introduction of “Humanity’s Last Exam,” a benchmark test that challenges A.I. systems. While existing models struggled to surpass a 10% success rate on the test, DeepSeek’s new reasoning model, DeepSeek-R1, has emerged as a frontrunner. Wang revealed that the model’s performance rivals the best American models.
Despite China’s strict GPU export regulations, DeepSeek claims to have achieved remarkable results with fewer resources than their American counterparts. Wang hinted at DeepSeek’s access to a significant number of Nvidia H100 GPUs, a type not legally available in China, which could give them an edge in A.I. development.
Looking ahead, Wang stressed the need for increased computational capacity and infrastructure in the U.S. to drive the advancement of A.I. models. He predicts that the A.I. market could reach $1 trillion once A.I. achieves artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.) within the next two to four years. A.G.I. refers to systems that can function as highly capable remote workers, a milestone Wang believes is on the horizon.