![\"Ali](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1770507550_664_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nThe man set to become one of the world\u2019s youngest artificial intelligence billionaires started his entrepreneurial journey as a bored preteen living in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
When Ali Ansari was 12, living with his family in a single room at his aunt\u2019s house in Woodland Hills, his immigrant mother told him to stop wasting time staring at his phone and try making money with it. <\/p>\n
He took his father\u2019s loafers and listed them on eBay for $50. <\/p>\n
\u201cMy dad was like, \u2018Why the hell did you sell my shoes?\u2019 \u201d Ansari said. \u201cMy mom was like, excited.\u201d<\/p>\n
While it was a bad deal for his dad, Ansari learned the thrill of making money. He has been chasing it ever since. <\/p>\n
He started biking around his neighborhood, visiting garage sales and thrift stores, buying whatever he could carry to sell online.<\/p>\n
Through middle school, high school, and college in California, he continued to build online businesses, launching an AI business in his 20s that could make him a billionaire this year, his 25th. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ali Ansari generates the training data that makes AI models like ChatGPT and Claude smarter.<\/p>\n
(Paul Kuroda\/For The Times)<\/p>\n
His hard hustle in his young years is paying off more than he could have imagined. The success has given him the freedom to buy his parents a house and a nice car. He has been featured in the news and gets recognized by people in the business. <\/p>\n
But the main change from his success so far, he says, is a huge increase in the amount of work and responsibility he has to shoulder. <\/p>\n
\u201cI feel very grateful and very stressed,\u201d he said. \u201cThat kind of summarizes it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ansari\u2019s AI company is called Micro1. Making AI smarter requires vast amounts of data, as well as training and testing. Micro1 recruits and manages thousands of human experts \u2014 coders, lawyers, doctors, professors and financial analysts \u2014 to gather expert information that is fed to AI models like ChatGPT. These experts review and correct the AI\u2019s output, making it more accurate. <\/p>\n
Micro1 is one of the key suppliers of that kind of expert human assistance for AI, alongside California competitors Scale AI, Surge and Mercor.<\/p>\n
Micro1 went from $4 million in annualized revenue in 2024 to $200 million today, according to Ansari. Even by Silicon Valley standards, that\u2019s a meteoric rise.<\/p>\n
Forbes<\/a> estimates that Ansari is on the verge of becoming a billionaire, based on ongoing funding conversations that value Micro1 at $2.5 billion. Micro1 was last valued at $500 million.<\/p>\n Ansari has a booming voice, a fashionable buzz cut and a meticulously maintained beard. He\u2019s fast with his fingers, usually responding immediately to text despite all he is juggling. He has the confidence of someone older, though his frequent use of the word \u201clike\u201d in conversation marks him as Gen Z.<\/p>\n His startup is based in Palo Alto and during monthly visits to Los Angeles, he works out of a coworking space in Woodland Hills \u2014 minutes away from his family, high school and the memories of his many teenage side hustles.<\/p>\n Ali Ansari is the cofounder of Micro1, a company that recruits and manages thousands of human experts to help train AI.<\/p>\n (Paul Kuroda\/For The Times)<\/p>\n \u201cThis area is my entire childhood,\u201d he said, gesturing out the window from his Woodland Hills office during an interview at the coworking space.<\/p>\n Ansari\u2019s family emigrated to the U.S. when he was 10, after winning the rare U.S. green card lottery. Before the move, they had a comfortable life in a small beach town in northern Iran, where his father owned a kitchen cabinet factory.<\/p>\n Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, Iran has witnessed multiple waves of middle-class exodus, where Iranian immigrants moved to the U.S to escape economic collapse and persecution. The growing presence of the Persian diaspora in Westwood earned it the moniker Tehrangeles<\/a>.<\/p>\n The family of four shared a single room at a relative\u2019s house for the first year. His mother took a job at Target for a short time. The transition was rough for Ansari, who wasn\u2019t fluent in English and often got in trouble for fooling around in school. <\/p>\n \u201cTeachers would call my mom, and they\u2019d be like, \u2018Hey, your son\u2019s making like, cow noises again\u2019 or something,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n![\"Ali](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1770507551_788_.jpeg\")
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