Knowledge-labeling firm Scale AI confirmed on Friday that it has obtained a “vital” funding from Meta that values the startup at $29 billion. The startup additionally stated its co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang is stepping down from his position to affix Meta and assist the larger firm with its AI work.
Reviews indicate that Meta invested about $14.3 billion for a 49% stake within the startup, which produces and labels information that’s used to coach the big language fashions that underpin a good portion of generative AI growth.
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 information 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 good individuals becoming a member of this group within the coming weeks,” a spokesperson for Meta instructed TechCrunch.
Jason Droege, Scale’s present chief technique officer, will hop in as interim CEO. Scale AI famous that Meta’s funding will likely be used to pay buyers and shareholders, in addition to to gas progress. The corporate emphasised that it stays an unbiased 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 approach 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 keeping with information by SingalFire, the company lost 4.3% of its top talent to other AI labs last year.
For the final a number of years, main AI labs reminiscent of OpenAI have relied on Scale AI to provide and label information that’s used to coach fashions. In latest months, Scale AI and its information annotation opponents have began hiring extremely expert individuals, reminiscent of PhD scientists and senior software program engineers, to generate high-quality information for frontier AI labs.
Simply final 12 months, Scale AI raised $1 billion final 12 months from buyers together with Amazon and Meta at a valuation of $13.8 billion.