Several American media outlets reported on Tuesday (June 10) that Meta is in talks to invest $14 billion in the startup company Scale AI and has hired their CEO, Alexandr Wang, to join Meta’s AI project.
This deal would be one of the largest external investments in Meta’s history, signaling the social media giant’s significant move in restructuring its AI business.
Meta’s AI project has been lagging behind its tech rivals, leading to a delay in the release of an important new model.
According to reports from The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, as part of the proposed deal that is still being finalized, some Scale AI employees, including Wang, will join Meta to participate in developing a new AI project called “Super Intelligence.”
In the field of AI, three fundamental pillars are indispensable – computing power, algorithms, and data. Scale AI is a leading technology company that provides high-quality data labeling services.
In recent years, AI developers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta have invested billions of dollars in startups like Scale to hire numerous talents to train large-language models, aiding in continuously improving models in various applications, from generating code to writing articles.
The human evaluators of these models work after training with data from the internet and other sources. Therefore, Scale and similar companies are also known as “post-training companies.”
Multiple media outlets reported that Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, personally engaged in recruiting for the Super Intelligence project, including directly contacting AI researchers through WhatsApp and sending emails to sought-after candidates.
On Tuesday, Meta’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, sent an internal notification to some employees, stating that the company is finalizing details on its AI leadership plan.
According to The Information, even though Scale may not disclose any specific data sets, based on Wang’s understanding of the data and issues that interest Meta’s competitors, and his ability to improve models in tasks like coding or solving challenging scientific problems with this data and issues, it could be extremely useful for Meta. Considering Meta’s significant lag in developing the best AI models, they are likely very interested in this type of data.
With Wang’s addition, Zuckerberg undoubtedly hopes to change the company’s situation in recruiting top AI talents.
Reports from outlets like Nikkei and Bloomberg state that this investment will give Meta a 49% stake in Scale AI. The social media giant and the startup company have discussed an arrangement where Meta will receive non-voting shares. One source mentioned that if these shares were to become voting shares, Wang would have control over them.
The source also mentioned that part of the investment cash will be distributed to Scale’s shareholders, who will retain their ownership in the startup company.