And one of the largest data labeling and production companies, Scale AI, recently raised a $325 million round led by Meta. This agreement is an important inflection point for both groups. The net investment thus grows to roughly $14.3 billion, for a 49% interest. This puts Scale AI in the enviable position of an impressive $29 billion valuation. This level of financial backing goes to show Meta’s determination to continue strengthening its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts.
More than a half-dozen years, OpenAI has trusted Scale AI. They generate and annotate the data we need to train our models. At the same time, the demand for high-quality data is increasing exponentially. In reaction, Scale AI emerged as a powerful force in the generative AI world. The company’s data continues to fuel much of the broader generative AI boom. This renders its role absolutely critical in today’s hyper-competitive tech environment.
Alexandr Wang, co-founder and CEO of leading AI data-labeling company Scale AI, is in the midst of a dramatic generational leadership transition. He will resign from the federal government to assume a new position at Meta. Wang is indeed the latest addition to Meta’s massive R&D predictably in its race to develop new AI technologies, including metasuperintelligence. Jason Droege, the chief strategy officer at Scale AI, will become interim CEO.
We’re excited to share that our strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI has closed. We’ll continue to work together to create the data that will feed AI models. We’re excited to have Alexandr Wang start at Meta to support with our own efforts towards developing superintelligence. Stay tuned for more on this effort and about the incredible individuals who are joining this team over the next few weeks. – Meta spokesperson
The investment makes sense amid Scale AI’s growing competition in the lucrative data annotation industry. Rivals are hoovering up the best talent, from PhD scientists to senior software developers. Their ambition is to dominate this strategic industry. Despite these challenges, Scale AI recently raised $1 billion from investors, including Amazon and Meta, and doubled its valuation to $13.8 billion over the past year.
All this came crashing down on Scale AI last year, when it suffered the ignominious loss of 4.3% of its star workforce to competing AI labs. The ongoing talent drain demonstrates just how competitive the industry has gotten. Companies are currently in a heated competition for talents in data generation and labeling.
Meta’s investment is expected to bolster its AI capabilities, which have lagged behind those of industry leaders such as Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Scale AI has been doing this with non-military applications — specifically generating high quality data for frontier AI research labs. This collaboration has the potential to help make Meta’s own public-facing AI models safer!
