As part of a transformative commitment to superintelligence, Meta Platforms Inc. today announced an investment of $14.3 billion in Scale AI, a leading data platform for AI training and custom AI applications.
This burgeoning superpower in the tech landscape, now worth more than $29 billion after its latest round of funding, will also see Meta take a 49% stake and most importantly – welcome Scale AI’s 28-year-old CEO and co-founder, Alexandr Wang, into Meta’s rapidly expanding superintelligence team.
The acquisition highlights Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s new emphasis on artificial intelligence, including the lofty goal of creating AI systems that are smarter than the human brain — a phenomenon Meta is calling “superintelligence” and others call Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
The investment is one of Meta’s biggest yet in an external AI commitment, emphasizing a change in its overall strategy to advance AI development.
Alexandr Wang, a well-known AI industry face, will contribute to Meta’s superintelligence work, but will also maintain his board position at Scale AI.
His skills in the supply of top-notch training data (training data; an essential part of the process to develop state-of-the-art AI models) are understood to be key in Meta’s race for high-tech AI. For Scale AI, Jason Droege, Scale AI’s CSO, will step in as its new CEO on an interim basis.
Scale AI, which was founded in 2016, has become known in the industry for its data labeling services, which are a crucial part of training large language models.
The firm has a wide range of clients, from large companies such as Google and OpenAI to the U.S. Department of Defense, with which it has worked on several projects related to A.I. The new deal is expected to significantly broaden Meta’s commercial relationship with Scale AI.
Scale AI, which, for now, will remain a standalone business unit, is folding its CEO and several of its employees deep into Meta’s AI group, which underscores the degree of collaboration in this arrangement.
The move is seen as Meta’s leading strategy to aggressively compete in the intensifying AI race, especially as it tries to catch up to competitors that have gained considerable momentum with their consumer-facing large language models. The investment is further evidence of Meta’s dedication to creating human-level and superhuman AI systems, and a more direct pathway toward its ultimate AI vision.