It has never been easier to take on the big boys, says Alexandr Wang.

Speaking at a Y Combinator event, the founder of Scale AI, who now runs Meta’s superintelligence labs, said AI has been a game-changer for startups.

“It’s probably a once-in-a-civilization opportunity to be a dreamer and have a vision and ambition and impose a vision of what the future world should be like by building something amazing,” Wang said in a video of the event released Wednesday.

He said it wasn’t so easy when he founded his AI training company in 2016. Scale AI is among the first data labeling companies, paying thousands of contractors around the world to filter, classify and train AI responses for the world’s largest AI labs. Wang, who was CEO, left Scale to join Meta last June as part of a $14.3 billion deal the social media company made with his startup.

“It was like David versus Goliath. You had to be smart and find an angle on the market and find a way to compete even if you had a lot less resources,” Wang said. “Now I think, generally speaking, with the power of agents and AI, it’s a lot closer to Goliath versus Goliath.”

He added that if a startup adopts AI agents in the “most ambitious way,” it can easily beat established companies. AI agents are software systems that can automatically complete multi-step tasks, such as writing code or managing customer support.

Wang’s comments about now being a generational time to launch a business echo what leading voices in Silicon Valley have said on the topic.

At the same YC event, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reiterated his stance on the potential of AI for startups.

“I think we’re going to go through a very difficult period and, again, there’s never a better time to start a startup than now,” Altman said. “I hope we can repeat it every year from now on, but it’s certainly true at this point in history.”

Famed technology investor Vinod Khosla predicted that AI will lead to a small business boom because entrepreneurs can outsource tasks such as legal and accounting work to AI.

“My guess is that by 2035, 10 years from now, which is a very short period, we will have 1/4 the number of corporate employees, maybe less, and we will have 50 million microentrepreneurs doing their own thing, being their own bosses,” he said in a May podcast.