Scale AI’s founder dethrones Taylor Swift as world’s youngest self-made female billionaire

Lucy Guo, the 30-year-old co-founder of Scale AI and founder of content platform Passes, has become the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, passing pop superstar Taylor Swift, according to Forbes’ latest ranking released Wednesday.

Guo’s estimated net worth of $1.3 billion reportedly comes from her stake in Scale AI, a data-labeling firm she co-founded in 2016 at the age of 21 with Alexandr Wang. 

Scale AI was recently valued at $25 billion in a tender offer set to close in early June, a source familiar with the matter told The New York Post. She departed from the company in 2018 but retained a 5% stake worth roughly $1.2 billion.

Early life, questionable exit from Scale AI

Guo was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by Chinese immigrant parents, where she began coding in middle school and later dropped out of Carnegie Mellon University after winning a $100,000 entrepreneurial fellowship from billionaire investor Peter Thiel. 

Her early career included a stint at Quora in 2015, where she met Wang, and a brief tenure at Snapchat as the company’s first female designer.

At Scale AI, Guo led operations and production design. Some sources claim she and current company CEO Wang had disagreements, and that led to her getting “fired.”

“We had a difference of opinion, but I am proud of what Scale AI has accomplished,” she told The Information last year.

Guo now leads the 2022-founded Passes, a content creation platform that she describes as a “family-friendly” alternative to OnlyFans and Patreon. The platform supposedly lets creators keep 90% of their earnings and claims to have made several millionaires since its launch. 

Passes is currently at the center of a class action lawsuit filed in February, alleging the platform allowed the distribution of child pornography. 

The suit accuses Alec Celestin, a talent agent for Passes, and Lani Ginoza, the company’s director of talent, of knowingly permitting the circulation of explicit content featuring Alice Rosenblum, an underage model affiliated with OnlyFans, on the site.

According to the complaint, Guo personally intervened to override Passes’ internal safeguards designed to protect teenage content creators aged 15 to 17 and removed protections for the plaintiff against exploitation.

Forbes reported that Passes quickly banned all underage creators and deleted their content just before filing the lawsuit. Guo’s legal team filed a motion in April to dismiss the case, denouncing it as a baseless, defamatory attack on her and the company.

Taylor Swift’s music label negotiating with AI firms over copyright laws

In other news, major record labels Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music are negotiating with AI music startups Suno and Udio about licensing frameworks for AI-generated music that samples or mimics their artists’ work.

Sources familiar with the talks told Bloomberg that the music companies are demanding the implementation of fingerprinting and attribution tools, similar to YouTube’s Content ID, to track the usage of copyrighted material in AI training and outputs. 

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had already taken legal action last June, filing a lawsuit against Suno and Udio. The complaint accused both firms of copyright infringement for using licensed music to train their models. 

In response, Suno claimed that its AI creates original compositions rather than copying existing tracks. Udio propounded that it trains its system on abstract musical ideas not owned by any single entity, with safeguards to avoid reproducing copyrighted work or identifiable artist voices.

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