Meta has completed a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, acquiring a 49% stake in the startup and valuing it at over $29 billion. This deal marks Meta's second-largest investment to date, following its $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014, and deepens the strategic partnership between the two companies, according to Reuters.
Following the investment, Scale AI appointed Jason Droege as interim CEO, succeeding co-founder Alexandr Wang. Wang has joined Meta to lead a new team focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI) and support Meta's broader AI initiatives, while maintaining a seat on Scale AI's board. Mark Zuckerberg personally facilitated Wang's move, underscoring Meta's determination to regain ground in the competitive AI landscape.
"Meta's investment acknowledges Scale's achievements and reinforces our shared belief that the future of AI is limitless," said Wang, as reported by the Financial Times. The partnership will leverage Scale AI's expertise in data labeling—a crucial process that categorizes images and text for training AI models—to accelerate the development of large language models.
Scale AI currently provides labeled training data to major clients like Microsoft, OpenAI, General Motors, and Toyota through platforms such as Remotasks and Outlier. The investment arrives as Meta faces mounting pressure to advance its AI capabilities amid stiff competition from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Meta has announced that it will reveal more details about the new AI team and upcoming projects in the coming weeks.
