Meta is paying $14.3 billion to purchase 49-percent of Scale AI and rent its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to reboot its troubled AI efforts.
As a part of the deal, Wang will report on to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the corporate introduced on Thursday. He’ll lead a brand new AI lab inside Meta tasked with constructing “superintelligence” and stay on Scale’s board of administrators. “We’ll share extra about this effort and the nice individuals becoming a member of this staff within the coming weeks,” Meta spokesperson Ashley Zandy stated in an announcement.
For the previous a number of weeks, Zuckerberg has been actively recruiting a brand new staff of researchers from rival corporations to work for Wang’s new staff, in line with individuals aware of the matter and different press stories. Zuckerberg has reached out to would-be recruits straight — often through a chilly e mail or WhatsApp message — and lured a few of them from firms like Google with seven and eight-figure compensation packages.
Scale works with Google, OpenAI, and others to assist prepare their fashions by having people annotate and label the info that feeds them. Most of that work is completed via low-cost labor exterior of the US, and it has turn out to be a crucial element of AI improvement.
Because the disappointing debut of Llama 4 earlier this yr, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been wanting to meet up with rivals like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek. Llama 4’s launch was delayed a number of instances, after which Meta was caught gaming a public leaderboard to make the mannequin seem higher than it really was. The corporate has nonetheless not launched Llama 4 Behemoth, its largest and most costly model that was teased in April.
Final month, Zuckerberg said that two of Meta’s prime priorities for 2025 are making its ChatGPT rival, Meta AI, “the main private AI” and “constructing full normal intelligence.” He just lately acknowledged that Meta AI has reached one billion month-to-month customers, though the prominence of the assistant throughout Instagram, WhatsApp, and Fb closely influences this quantity.
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