Wang didn't set out to become a military contractor. He founded Scale after dropping out of MIT at age 19 with Lucy Guo, a fellow intern at the question-and-answer site Quora. At the time, breakthroughs in AI research were leading to algorithms that could detect images and seamlessly translate language. But the reams of images and videos AI labs were pulling off the web to train their data needed to be labeled to help teach the algorithms what they were looking at. Wang and Guo built Scale to help solve that problem, hiring contractors around the world to painstakingly add labels to images and then charging for the service.