Meta finalizes investment in Scale AI, valuing startup at $29 billion

Meta Platforms has finalized an investment in Scale AI that values the startup at over $29 billion, Scale AI said on Thursday.

Two sources familiar with the matter said that Meta's investment in Scale AI amounts to $14.3 billion.

The sources said that Scale CEO and co-founder Alexandr Wang will join a new "superintelligence" unit inside Meta to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term that refers to machines that can match or surpass human capabilities.

Scale's chief strategy officer, Jason Droege, will serve as its interim CEO, Scale AI added.

By poaching Wang, who does not have formal experience in frontier AI research, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting that Meta's AI efforts can be turned around by an adept business leader more in the mold of OpenAI's Sam Altman than the research scientists at the helm of most competing labs.

The deal ranks as Meta's second-largest ever after its $19 billion buyout of WhatsApp.

Since many of those labs have contracted Scale for data services, Zuckerberg could also obtain an inside track into his rivals' priorities around data, one of the key ingredients for developing today's AI models.

Scale was valued at nearly $14 billion in a May 2024 funding round where the company raised $1 billion from backers including tech giants Nvidia, Amazon and Meta.

Founded in 2016, Scale AI provides vast amounts of accurately labeled data, which is pivotal for training sophisticated tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

To do so, Scale set up subsidiary platforms such as Remotasks and Outlier to recruit and manage gig-workers who manually label the data.

Wang, the 28-year-old co-founder, has steered the company to provide data labeling services across the buzzy tech sectors of the moment, from autonomous vehicles several years ago to generative AI today.