Knowledge-labeling firm Scale AI confirmed on Friday that it has acquired a “vital” 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 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 the information that’s used to coach the massive 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 folks becoming a member of this workforce 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 can 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 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 accordance 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 similar to OpenAI have relied on Scale AI to supply and label information that’s used to coach fashions. In current months, Scale AI and its information annotation rivals have began hiring extremely expert folks, similar to PhD scientists and senior software program engineers, to generate high-quality information 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.