Information-labeling firm Scale AI confirmed on Friday that it has acquired a “important” funding from Meta that values the startup at $29 billion. The startup additionally mentioned its co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang is stepping down from his function to affix Meta and assist the larger firm with its AI work.
Reviews point out that Meta invested about $14.3 billion for a 49% stake within the startup, which produces and labels knowledge that’s used to coach the massive language fashions that underpin a good portion of generative AI improvement.
Meta confirmed the funding. “Meta has finalized our strategic partnership and funding in Scale AI. As a part of this, we are going to deepen the work we do collectively producing knowledge for AI fashions and Alexandr Wang will be a part of Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts. We’ll share extra about this effort and the nice individuals becoming a member of this crew within the coming weeks,” a spokesperson for Meta advised TechCrunch.
Jason Droege, Scale’s present chief technique officer, will hop in as interim CEO. Scale AI famous that Meta’s funding might be used to pay buyers and shareholders, in addition to to gasoline progress. The corporate emphasised that it stays an impartial entity. Wang will proceed on the data-labeling agency as a director on its board.
As my colleague Max Zeff wrote on Wednesday, this funding is a method for Meta to enhance its AI efforts as its rivals Google, OpenAI and Anthropic rush forward, and the social media firm’s personal AI mannequin releases path the competitors. Plus, in line with knowledge by SingalFire, the corporate misplaced 4.3% of its prime expertise to different AI labs final yr.
For the final a number of years, main AI labs resembling OpenAI have relied on Scale AI to supply and label knowledge that’s used to coach fashions. In current months, Scale AI and its knowledge annotation opponents have began hiring extremely expert individuals, resembling PhD scientists and senior software program engineers, to generate high-quality knowledge for frontier AI labs.
Simply final yr, Scale AI raised $1 billion final yr from buyers together with Amazon and Meta at a valuation of $13.8 billion.