Why Meta's 'Superintelligence' Project Lead Alexandr Wang Says It Is A Strange Time To Be A Scientist

Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old Scale AI founder now heading to Meta Platforms’ META new "super-intelligence" lab says artificial-intelligence models already possess insights that science cannot match and that makes it “a strange time to be a scientist, but an exciting time for science.”

What Happened: Wang told a Y Combinator audience the advantage is clearest in biology, where “there's probably intuitions that the models have about biology that humans don't even have because they have this different form of intelligence.”

He narrated a story that predicted AI systems will soon run "all the frontiers of R&D," leaving human researchers to "look at the discoveries the AIs make and try to understand them."

The comments arrive days after Meta paid about $14 billion for a 49% stake in Scale and hired Wang to accelerate Mark Zuckerberg's push for artificial general intelligence.

Meta's move follows a wider trend. Alphabet Inc. GOOG GOOGL Google unveiled a Gemini-powered "AI co-scientist" in February aimed at speeding biomedical breakthroughs. Academic work already shows AI models outperforming humans on protein-folding and genetic-sequence tasks, raising hopes for faster drug discovery.

"Areas like biology will fuel breakthroughs in medicine and healthcare," Wang said, adding that the rest of the economy will "chug along giving humans what they want."

Why It Matters: Venture investors share that view. CB Insights counts 370 AI-biology startups worth a combined $60 billion, up 28% from 2023.

Meanwhile, Wang's arrival at Meta hihglights the company's escalating talent hunt. Reuters reported Meta recently dangled $100 million signing bonuses to lure OpenAI staff. Y Combinator president Garry Tan called Wang "an inspiration to the next generation of founders" in a post on X.

Even though critics warn dual-use risks rise as models master bio-engineering, prompting calls for guardrails even inside Meta's lab, Wang argues embracing the shift is essential.

Photo Courtesy: Gorodenkoff on Shutterstock.com