Last month, Scale AI CEO, Alexandr Wang, took out a full page ad in The Washington Post telling President Trump, “America must win this AI war.”
The bold statement sparked mixed responses, as Wang’s appearance on Sunday night during the opening of Web Summit Qatar showed. Felix Salmon of Axios, Wang’s interviewer at the Web Summit Qatar, asked how many people in the room agreed with this opinion. He counted only two hands. Salmon noted that when he asked how many people disagreed with the opinion, a “overwhelming number” of hands were raised. Salmon then asked Wang to defend her opinion. Wang explained that AI would fundamentally alter the nature of national defense. He said that he was born in Los Alamos (New Mexico), “the birthplace for the atomic bomb”and that both his parents were physicists working at the National Lab.
Wang stated that he sees this as a race involving the U.S. He expressed his concern that AI would allow China to “leapfrog”the military might of the “Western powers”which is why the full-page advertisement was created.
Wang echoed language that is increasingly coming from defense technology startups and VCs. They are pushing for AI weapons with more autonomy and more AI weapons in general. They hypothesize a situation in which China releases fully autonomous AI weaponry, while the U.S. has to wait for a human decision maker before firing.
Wang argued that the U.S. and China should be the two countries to choose for the LLM baseline models. He believes that this will be a two horse race as well, ignoring other players such as France’s Mistral. He said that U.S. model cars are free-speech friendly, while Chinese models reflect the communist society’s viewpoints.
Researchers have found that many popular Chinese LLMs have the government’s censorship baked into them. Concerns about Chinese government backdoors to gather data plague the Chinese models.
Wang’s expressed concerns about government influences in AI seemed particularly timely, as his talk coincided Scale’s announcement of an agreement with Qatar’s government. Wang announced on Sunday that Scale would assist Qatar in building 50 AI-powered apps for government, ranging from healthcare to education.
The company is best known for hiring legions of contract employees, many of whom are from overseas, to manually train models. It works with Microsoft OpenAI, Meta and most of the U.S. major foundational models. It also offers AI apps and other products like an AI data engine. Scale AI’s DoD customers will likely be pleased with the overtly pro-American language. The Web Summit speech also showed how many people are equally uncomfortable about the U.S. having AI powers, too.
