AIs latest 20-something billionaire got his start at L.A. garage sales

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The man set to become one of the world’s youngest artificial intelligence billionaires started his entrepreneurial journey as a bored preteen living in Los Angeles.When Ali Ansari was 12, living with his family in a single room at his aunt’s house in Woodland Hills, his immigrant mother told him to stop wasting time staring at his phone and try making money with it.He took his father’s loafers and listed them on eBay for $50.

“My dad was like, ‘Why the hell did you sell my shoes?’ ” Ansari said.“My mom was like, excited.”While it was a bad deal for his dad, Ansari learned the thrill of making money.

He has been chasing it ever since.Business A Stanford software engineering degree used to be a golden ticket.

He started biking around his neighborhood, visiting garage sales and thrift stores, buying whatever he could carry to sell online.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.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.

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.“I feel very grateful and very stressed,” he said.

“That kind of summarizes it.” Business From anxiety about job loss to data privacy, mental health workers, lawmakers and labor unions are trying to mitigate AI’s risks as healthcare providers double down on the technology.Ansari’s 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 — coders,...