Meta is reportedly investing practically $15 billion dollars within the information labeling agency Scale AI and taking a 49% stake within the startup, whereas additionally bringing on CEO Alexandr Wang to assist lead a brand new “superintelligence” lab throughout the firm.
The deal is harking back to Meta’s earlier giant and dangerous bets, resembling its $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp and its $1 billion Instagram purchase. On the time these mergers closed, many individuals recommended Meta had grossly overpaid for the platforms — and at the moment’s discourse is not any totally different. There’s no scarcity of traders and founders who had been left scratching their heads this weekend over Meta’s honor tie-up.
Ultimately, WhatsApp and Instagram turned an integral a part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s empire. The query is whether or not the Scale AI deal will equally work in Meta’s favor, proving Zuckerberg’s prescient technique but once more, or whether or not the corporate is greedy at straws in a misguided effort to catch as much as rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
On this case, Meta isn’t betting on an rising social media app, however on the info used to coach high AI fashions. For the final a number of years, main AI labs resembling OpenAI have relied on Scale AI to supply and label information that’s used to coach fashions. In current months, Scale AI and its information annotation rivals have began hiring extremely expert individuals, resembling PhD scientists and senior software program engineers, to generate high-quality information for frontier AI labs.
It could profit Meta to have a detailed relationship with a knowledge supplier like Scale. Meta’s leaders have complained a few lack of innovation round information within the firm’s main AI groups, in accordance with an individual conversant in the matter.
Earlier this 12 months, Meta’s GenAI unit launched Llama 4, a family of AI models that did not match the capabilities of Chinese language AI lab DeepSeek’s fashions, and which was broadly seen as a disappointment. Not serving to issues, Meta is making an attempt to fight an attrition downside. Based on information compiled by SignalFire, Meta lost 4.3% of its top talent to AI labs in 2024.
Meta isn’t simply betting on Scale AI to reignite its AI efforts, but in addition on Wang to steer the aforementioned new superintelligence workforce. The 28-year-old CEO has confirmed himself to be a powerful startup founder — he’s identified round Silicon Valley to be formidable, a superb salesman, and really well-connected. Over the previous few months, Wang has been meeting with world leaders to debate AI’s affect on society.
Wang hasn’t led an AI lab of this type earlier than, nevertheless, and he doesn’t have the identical AI analysis background that many different AI lab leaders do, like Secure Superintelligence’s Ilya Sutskever or Mistral’s Arthur Mensch. That’s maybe why Meta can also be stated to be recruiting high-profile expertise like DeepMind’s Jack Rae to spherical out its new AI analysis group.
The post-acquisition destiny of Scale AI the corporate is a bit murky. The position of real-world information in AI mannequin coaching is altering — some AI labs have introduced information assortment efforts in-house, whereas others have elevated their reliance on artificial (i.e. AI-generated) information. In April, The Data reported that Scale AI had missed some of its revenue targets.
Based on Anyscale co-founder Robert Nishihara, a number of frontier AI labs are exploring novel methods to leverage and optimize information, a lot of that are fairly compute-intensive.
“Information is a shifting goal,” Nishihara advised TechCrunch in an interview. “It’s not only a finite effort to catch up — you must innovate.”
It’s potential that Meta and Wang’s relationship might scare off different AI labs which have historically labored with Scale AI. If that’s the case, this deal might be a boon for Scale AI’s rivals, resembling Turing, Surge AI, and even nonconventional information suppliers such because the not too long ago launched LM Area.
Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth advised TechCrunch through e mail that he’s obtained elevated curiosity from prospects in mild of the rumors round Meta’s take care of Scale AI.
“I feel there will likely be some purchasers who will desire to work with a accomplice that’s extra impartial,” he stated.
Solely time will inform how Meta’s funding will pan out for its AI efforts, however the firm has important floor to make up. In the meantime, the competitors isn’t slowing down. OpenAI is gearing up for the discharge of its subsequent flagship mannequin, GPT-5, in addition to its first brazenly obtainable mannequin in years — a mannequin that’ll compete with Meta’s present and future Llama releases.