Meta is paying $14 billion to catch up in the AI race
Meta is paying $14.3 billion to acquire 49 percent of Scale AI and hire its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to revamp its troubled AI efforts.
As part of the deal, Wang will report directly to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and remain on Scale's board of directors, both companies announced on Thursday. Sources say Wang will lead a new AI lab at Meta tasked with building "superintelligence." Meta spokesperson Ashley Zandy says the company "will share more about this effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks."
Zuckerberg has been actively recruiting a new team of researchers from rival firms to join Wang's team, according to people familiar with the matter and other press reports. The Meta founder has reached out to potential recruits directly - usually via a cold email or WhatsApp message - and lured some of them away from companies like Google with seven- and eight-figure compensation packages.
Scale works with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to help train their models by having humans annotate and label the data that feeds them. Most of that work is done through low-cost labor outside of the US, and it has become a critical component of AI development. With Wang …