MEI -- merit, excellence, and intelligence -- will determine hiring at Scale AI, declares CEO Alexandr Wang in a statement. "That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart."
An MIT dropout, Wang became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at age 25, by supplying AI companies with "human workers and software services that label and test the data used to train" their models.
"We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual," Wang wrote. "We believe that people should be judged by the content of their character — and, as colleagues, be additionally judged by their talent, skills, and work ethic."
"No group has a monopoly on excellence," Wang writes, so "a hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas."
Wang's parents, both Chinese immigrants, were physicists in Los Alamos.
MEI will "get us where we’re going, as we embark on our next chapter focusing on data abundance, frontier data, and reliable measurement to accelerate the development and adoption of AI models," he concludes. (I have no idea what that means.)
Silicon Valley leaders praised the meritocracy pledge, reports Fox Business.
Elon Musk tweeted "Great!" In 2023, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO wrote that "DEI must die," adding that, "The point was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination."
"Well said!" wrote Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase. "I expect others will follow."
DEI-related jobs increased 55 percent from June to August 2020, but some corporations are cutting back. "Zoom axed its internal DEI team amid broader layoffs" in February reports Taylor Telford in the Washington Post. "Meta, Tesla, DoorDash, Lyft, Home Depot, Wayfair and X were among major corporations making steep cuts in 2023, slashing the size of their DEI teams by 50 percent or more."