It's never been easier to take on the big guys, says Alexandr Wang. At a talk at a Y Combinator event, the Scale AI founder, who now leads Meta's Superintelligence Labs, said that AI has been a game changer for startups.
"It's probably a once in a civilization opportunity to be a dreamer and to have a vision and to have ambition and to impose a view of how the future world should look by building something amazing," Wang said in a video from the event released on Wednesday.
He said that it wasn't so easy when he started his AI training company in 2016. Scale AI is among the earliest data labeling companies — it pays thousands of contractors around the world to filter, rank, and train AI responses for the world's largest AI labs. Wang, who was CEO, left Scale to join Meta last June as part of a $14.3 billion deal the social media company made with his startup.
"It was like David versus Goliath. You had to be clever, and you had to find an angle into the market and figure out a way to compete even though you had much fewer resources," Wang said. "Now I actually think with the power of agents and AI broadly speaking it's much closer to Goliath versus Goliath."
He added that if a startup embraces AI agents in the "most ambitious ways," it can easily beat incumbent companies. AI agents are software systems that can sef complete multi-step tasks such as writing code or handling customer support.
Wang's comments on now being a generational moment to launch a business closely echo what Silicon Valley's top voices have said about the subject.
At the same YC event, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reiterated his stance on AI's potential for startups. "I think we'll go through a very steep period, which again, never a better time to do a startup than right now," Altman said. "I hope we can say that again every year from now on, but it's certainly true about this moment in history."
Famed tech investor Vinod Khosla predicted that AI will lead to a small-business boom because entrepreneurs can outsource tasks like legal and accounting work to AI.
"I would guess by 2035, 10 years from now, that's a very short time, we will have 1/4 the number of corporate employees, maybe less, and we will have 50 million micro entrepreneurs doing their thing, being their own boss," he said on a May podcast.