Meta is paying $14.3 billion to purchase 49-percent of Scale AI and rent its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to reboot its troubled AI efforts.
As a part of the deal, Wang will report on to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the corporate introduced on Thursday. He’ll lead a brand new AI lab inside Meta tasked with constructing “superintelligence” and stay on Scale’s board of administrators. “We are going to share extra about this effort and the nice individuals becoming a member of this staff within the coming weeks,” Meta spokesperson Ashley Zandy stated in an announcement.
For the previous a number of weeks, Zuckerberg has been actively recruiting a brand new staff of researchers from rival corporations to work for Wang’s new staff, based on individuals acquainted with the matter and different press stories. Zuckerberg has reached out to would-be recruits instantly — often by way of a chilly electronic mail or WhatsApp message — and lured a few of them from firms like Google with seven and eight-figure compensation packages.
Scale works with Google, OpenAI, and others to assist prepare their fashions by having people annotate and label the information that feeds them. Most of that work is completed by means of low-cost labor exterior of the US, and it has turn into a essential element of AI growth.
For the reason that disappointing debut of Llama 4 earlier this yr, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been wanting to meet up with opponents like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek. Llama 4’s launch was delayed a number of instances, after which Meta was caught gaming a public leaderboard to make the mannequin seem higher than it truly was. The corporate has nonetheless not launched Llama 4 Behemoth, its largest and costliest model that was teased in April.
Final month, Zuckerberg stated that two of Meta’s high priorities for 2025 are making its ChatGPT rival, Meta AI, “the main private AI” and “constructing full common intelligence.” He just lately said that Meta AI has reached one billion month-to-month customers, though the prominence of the assistant throughout Instagram, WhatsApp, and Fb closely influences this quantity.
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