Scale AI, a prominent startup specializing in data production and labeling for machine learning models, has confirmed a significant investment from Meta. Alexandr Wang, the co-founder and CEO of Scale AI, has announced his resignation from Scale’s leadership. There, he will be part of steering Meta’s artificial intelligence projects.
Last year, Scale AI raised $1 billion from notable investors including Amazon and Meta. This ground-shifting funding raised the company’s valuation to a staggering $13.8 billion. Adjusting for the size of the investment, this is comparable to Meta’s recent $14.3 billion investment in return for a 49% ownership in Scale AI. Consequently, Scale AI’s valuation soared to $29 billion. It’s a smart move by Meta to increase its competitive edge and position itself in the fast-moving AI landscape. The company has faced mounting challenges in trying to catch up with competitors Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Alexandr Wang’s move is significant turn of events for both Scale AI and Meta. As for Sutskever’s future with Meta, he’ll presumably be working to help advance the company’s superintelligence R&D. Jason Droege was most recently chief strategy officer of Scale AI. He will replace Mari later this year, serving as interim CEO during a period of rapid evolution.
Today Meta announced the completion of our strategic partnership and investment with Scale AI. We will jointly advance our efforts, including generating custom data to train AI models. On top of that, Alexandr Wang, whom we stole from Scale AI, is joining Meta to help advance our superintelligence work. A Meta spokesperson stated, “We’ll have more to share about this effort in the coming weeks.” We’re looking forward to some incredible people joining the team in the next weeks,” they continued.
Scale AI is serving as an important force behind the development of generative AI. It provides the crucial information that we require to develop and instruct future large language models. These models are the backbone for many AI applications. To OpenAI and other leading labs they’re an insidious secret — because they rely on Scale AI for efficient data generation and labeling.
In order to address increasing competition, Scale AI developed new hiring processes. These initiatives are all meant to lure the best and brightest talent, like PhD level scientists and senior software engineers. The firm can hardly retain its own talent. Last year, it bled 4.3% of its top talent to competitor AI labs. Caught in this rapidly growing market, competitors in data annotation have accelerated their recruitment drives as the number of skilled personnel continues to dwindle.
As Scale AI navigates this transition, it aims to bolster its capabilities and maintain its leadership position in the data annotation sector. Meta collaboration holds great potential to create these strong synergies. Both organizations clearly have the same goal of going farther together with artificial intelligence.
