Knowledge-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 stated its co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang is stepping down from his function to hitch Meta and assist the larger firm with its AI work.
Studies point out 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 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’ll 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 are going to share extra about this effort and the nice folks becoming a member of this staff 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 traders and shareholders, in addition to to gas development. 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 manner 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 information by SingalFire, the corporate misplaced 4.3% of its prime expertise to different AI labs final 12 months.
For the final a number of years, main AI labs resembling 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 opponents have began hiring extremely expert folks, resembling 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 traders together with Amazon and Meta at a valuation of $13.8 billion.
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