
Full transcript
FULL REMARKS: World’s Youngest AI Billionaire Alexander Wang Reveals How AI Will Amplify Humans|AQ1B
Introduction and Los Alamos upbringing
00:00at unprecedented scale. Next speaker is, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Alexander Wong, Chief AI Officer at Meta, the founder of Scale AI. Alexander Wong built the data infrastructure that powers much of the modern AI industry before joining Meta as Chief AI Officer. So, with a round of applause, please welcome Mr. Alexander Wong.
00:31Thank you so much for having me. Namaste. Uh it's fair to say my upbringing wasn't typical. My parents were physicists in a town called Los Alamos in New Mexico. Los Alamos is a government lab town where for decades scientists have come to push the boundaries of what's possible in mathematics, in supercomputing, in human genome studies, vaccine research, space explorations, and material science. My mother studies how plasma behaves inside stars. At the dinner dinner table, we'd talk about physics problems, scientific tradeoffs, the reasoning behind how systems work. One kid in my town made huge balls of plasma in their garage for a science fair project. You know, normal high school stuff. Growing up in a place like Los Alamos
01:19leaves two things deeply ingrained in you. A belief that anything is possible and that science should serve society. Those ideas are what led me to study AI while I was at I was at college at MIT. They led me to start my own company, Scale AI. And last year, they led me to Meta where I'm now the Chief AI Officer. If you believe that anything is possible, Meta is one of the few companies with the resources, talent, and ambition to push the science of AI forward at scale. If you want to make technology that serves society, Meta has an incredible opportunity to get this technology in into people's lives. Three and a half billion people use at least one of our apps every day. That blows my mind. It's more than half
From MIT to Scale AI and Meta
AI in use across India today
02:09a billion people in India alone. People are already using our AI to do amazing things. Across India, creators use our AI to automatically translate Reels into the language of the person watching. Small businesses talk to customers through WhatsApp business agents that they create in 10 minutes on their phones, and they use our GenAI tools to create ads and reach customers way more efficiently than they ever could before. And India has world-class developers building genius things to solve societal challenges. For example, there are more than 20 million people with disabilities in India who are locked out of education, jobs, and digital services because the digital world wasn't designed for them.
Healthcare and agriculture applications
02:53So, I-Stem built voice-first, AI-powered infrastructure that helps people with disabilities to learn, discover careers, and complete digital tasks independently, like converting textbooks into usable formats or giving personalized career guidance that takes into account their disability. In healthcare, researchers at Ashoka University used our SAM 3 model, which is trained on billions of natural images to speed up the identification and segmentation of cancer tumors and at-risk organs. Their model, OncoSeg, can help radiologists and radiology oncology teams do in seconds what it takes hours to do manually. The beauty of general-purpose models is the same technology that can segment tumors in the brain can segment leaves
Omnilingual models and government collaboration
03:41to help farmers assess the health of their crops, as AgriPoint has done. We recently open-sourced our omnilingual models, which recognize speech across more than 1,600 languages and can rapidly adapt to new languages with just a few audio samples. It's not a fantasy that in a few years we'll have real-time voice-to-voice translation for every spoken language on Earth. Now build that into your glasses, real-time translation in any language just for you. That's transformative. Perhaps most especially in countries like India where so many languages are spoken. In fact, language is an area where we're collaborating with the Indian government on. Through its AI Kosh platform, we're providing data sets in 10 major Indian
New models and personal super intelligence
04:29languages so people can build AI models that deeply understand Indian languages and context. I'm sure you're used to people from big tech world making lots of grand but vague assertions about what AI will be able to do. But we don't have to be vague. People use our AI right here, right now. They're getting value from it and they're building amazing things with it. And that gives us confidence about what we're building towards. We're releasing new models this year with the first coming in the next couple of months. These will be deeply integrated with our products in a way we're really excited about. We're optimistic about the trajectory we're on. The first models will be good and as the year goes on, I think we're going to be
05:10pushing the frontier. Our vision is personal super intelligence. AI that knows you, your goals, your interests, and helps you with whatever you're focused on doing. It serves you, whoever you are, wherever you are. We all lead busy lives. I'm sure you'd want to do more if only you had the time and head space. That's how I think about personal super intelligence. Say you want to be healthier. Your personal AI could help you see through a personal health plan covering diet, exercise, and sleep in your daily routine. Or you have a project you'd like to get done like putting on an event. You can track your progress, reach out to venues, arrange invites, remind you of things you haven't considered and more.
06:00If you love to go fishing or paint or want to travel more, it can help free you up so you can do more of these things. And it can give you advice when you need it and or help you show up as a better friend or in your community. It won't just do your admin, it'll be an extension of you so you can be you more. I get that some people will worry uh what companies that what companies like Meta really want is to get you hooked and leave you passively staring at screens. But the whole point of personal superintelligence is the opposite. It's about helping you be more active in your life, in pursuing your goals, and deepening your relationships. I know people are going to be skeptical when I say we're doing we're going to do
Responsibility and incentives
06:43this work responsibly. But you don't have to take us at our word, take us at our incentives. This is a competitive space, which is why we're seeing so much innovation. Given how intimately your personal AI will know you, people aren't going to hire us for the job if we're not doing it responsibly. Our AI needs to work the way we say it does, as well as we'd say it does, and as safely and as securely as you need it to. It needs to help you in your life and if it doesn't, people simply won't use it. We'll lose customers, we'll lose public trust, and we'll lose out to our competitors. That's why we're transparent about our models. We publish model cards and evaluation benchmarks and data so you can see how they work, their intended
07:29use, and how we assess their performance. And as they get more advanced, we're looking at ways to share even more. It's why we invest in the science of model evaluation, both improving the existing tests and building new ones for risks we haven't yet confronted. And it's why over many years we've developed ways to identify and mitigate potential risks. Before we release a model through risk assessments, scaled evaluations, red teaming, and fine-tuning. And we can monitor aggregate trends in how people use AI in our apps. So, we have a feedback loop that can flag potential risks and help us improve our models. As the models improve, the governance around them has to keep pace. So, we're innovating with how they learn and apply
Governance and evaluation
08:16principles and how they're tested and evaluated using AI to strengthen checks and balances. Realizing the full promise of AI is as much a matter of getting policy right as it is investment. There are four building blocks for AI. Talent, energy, data, and compute. Governments and industry need to work together to make sure there's access to each, so we can realize AI's potential and do it in a way that means you can build for your needs, not ours. That's in part about having bold national AI strategies and policies that encourage innovation, not patchworks of inconsistent regulations that make it harder. But above all, it's about collaboration between public and private sectors to deliver these
Policy: talent, energy, data, compute
09:05four building blocks. And to design and deploy AI that works for your citizens and your economies. I don't want these amazing technologies to be one-size-fits-all. I want them to serve your needs, designed for the challenges and opportunities that are unique to India, to societies across the global south, and all over the world. I want them to serve you as an individual, no matter who you are, where you live, what language you speak, or what culture you're a part of. That's only going to be possible if the public and private sector are on the same side. We need to be partners working together in a spirit of openness and collaboration. And with a sense of shared ambition. I truly believe we're on the cusp of a
Call for public-private partnership
09:50moment where really anything is possible. We want to work with you to build AI that serves our societies. I hope you'll work with us. Thank you.
10:07Thank you, Mr. Alexander Wang. Our heartfelt gratitude to you for your remarks, for sharing your findings as well. And well, your vision for AI and innovation. It does inspire many of us.