nor did he finish it himself. the Scale team has always been extremely talent-dense.

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.

> "API for human labor" a la MTurk was the original idea, was it not?

That's how spammers bypassed captcha for decades

I didn't mean to imply he started it alone. Though his co-founder Lucy Guo is almost as bizarre of a story as Wang himself. I'm curious, what were they doing before data labeling?

> Though his co-founder Lucy Guo is almost as bizarre

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.

Wasn't the data labeling the first thing?

With all the respect that is due, Lucy didn't do cr*p and also left quite early.

Scale is 99% Alex's credit.

You should perhaps explain how you know this.

This is America, if you have tea, spill it!