The Future is AI... My Future is at Scale AI

Steve Jobs once said, “These waves of technology – you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you're going to surf.”

In 1993, I remember calling my Dad and saying, “When everyone has the internet, it is going to be amazing.” I was a freshman at MIT, and across campus there were networked computers everywhere and you could message any of your friends from wherever you were. I knew if everyone could message each other anytime, the world would change.

In the spring of 1994, I opened up the help page on that same messaging app and it loaded the Mosaic Web Browser. It was painfully slow and clunky. I closed the app and didn’t think twice about it. Later that year, I opened Netscape 0.9 for the first time and browsed the seven sites on the Internet. It was blazing fast. Less than a year after that, Netscape added Javascript and I knew something important had happened… Web pages could be applications now. 

In the spring of 1996, a college recruiter showed up on campus at MIT. I wasn’t prepared, but I knew if there was anywhere in the world I wanted to work, it was Netscape. I could see the future and I wanted to be there. I showed up at the campus recruiting office, interviewed, flew to Mountain View, California a couple weeks later.  I flew back to Cambridge, MA with an offer to intern at Netscape that summer.

That was my first trip to Silicon Valley. Now I’m going back a second time. And largely for the same reason. 

I can see the future again. The future is in AI. And just like 1994, when a young Marc Andreessen founded Netscape with Jim Clark to bring the internet to the masses, a young Alexandr Wang has created a new billion-dollar company – Scale AI – to democratize AI. 

I’m thrilled to be starting at Scale AI today

In many AI applications, like training a chatbot or building a self-driving car, the challenge is teaching a computer to match the performance of human intelligence. But how does a computer learn to match human intelligence if it doesn’t know what human intelligence looks like? How can a computer identify a stop sign if it has never seen a stop sign? How can a computer understand the places and names in a document if it has never seen places or names before? 

This is where Scale comes in. Scale enables developers and scientists to ask humans, “Where are the stop signs?”, or, “What are the places and names in this document?” and captures those answers in a way that a computer can learn to do the same itself. These data captured are the labels or annotations that are the core inputs to training and testing an AI model. 

In many ways, this is the unsexy part of AI. The sexy parts of AI are the fancy algorithms and powerful silicon that allow AI practitioners to build a model that attempts to match the performance of humans. But if you don’t find a way to capture the performance of humans in an accurate and computer-understandable manner, it is extremely hard to build a model that matches that performance.  

Much like the Internet, the AI landscape is emerging quickly and in parallel. Lots of companies will continue to pop up. Not all of them will survive. The market will go through waves of consolidation. Amazon triumphed because it did something tangible and delivered real value to real customers. Scale is doing the same. 

Will Scale be the next Amazon? Well, it will be for me. I’m joining Alex Wang and the team at Scale as CTO to help bring this vision to reality. I’ll have combined responsibility for product direction and engineering, and will be helping Scale build the next set of products that make it much easier and quicker to build powerful AI applications.

I loved Amazon. But as Steve Jobs also said, “You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” 

My gut is telling me this is right, and I’m thrilled to be starting at Scale today. 

If you’d like to join my new team, view our openings: https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/scaleai/jobs/