Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang explains his “MEI” hiring policy

Yeah. So Mei, we basically rolled out this idea of merit, excellence and intelligence. And the basic idea is in every role, we're going to hire the best possible person, regardless of their demographics. And we're not going to do any sort of quota based optimization of our workforce to meet certain demographic targets. That doesn't mean we don't care about diversity. We actually care about having diverse pipelines and diverse top of funnel for all of our roles. But at the end of the day, the best, most capable person for every job is going to be the one that we hire. It's one of these things that was mildly controversial, but I think is also, you know, if, if we were to just take a big step back as to who should companies be hiring? Companies should hire the most talented people. And I think there's obviously this became this big question of how much social responsibility do companies have in what they do. My take is I operate in a very competitive industry. Scale's role is to help fuel artificial intelligence, this very important technology. We need incredibly smart people to be able to do this and, and we need the best people to be able to accomplish this. I think that this is something that I think most people at Scale would say was sort of implicitly true or sort of. It wasn't like a departure from how many of us thought of what we do at scale. But it was really valuable for us to codify it because it means, I think it gives everybody confidence that even if this is how we operate today, companies change over time. We're not going to change this quality.