Over a week after Meta announced its multibillion-dollar investment in Scale AI, the data labelling startup’s interim CEO has made it clear that the company has no plans to change course. “Unlike some other recent tech deals you might have heard about in the AI space, this is not a pivot or a winding down,” Jason Droege, the interim CEO of Scale AI, said in a blog post published on Wednesday, June 18. The post addressed to Scale AI’s customers, employees, and investors comes on the heels of Meta’s announcement that it is investing $14.3 billion in the startup for a 49 per cent stake. However, the social media giant will not have any voting power on the board. Instead, Alexandr Wang, the co-founder of Scale AI, will join Meta to lead its newly formed research lab focused on achieving artificial superintelligence (ASI), that is, a hypothetical AI system with intelligence exceeding that of the human brain. The first-of-its-kind acqui-hire deal in the AI industry is also expected to bring a small number of Scale AI employees to Meta, which supposedly offered OpenAI employees $100 million bonuses to join its ASI lab. Droege, the chief strategy officer at Scale AI, was tapped to serve as the interim chief executive following Wang’s exit. “Scale remains, unequivocally, an independent company. This deal rewards many of the people who helped build Scale into what it is today, but more importantly to me, it’s also a validation of the course we’re on,” he said. “Scale remains a well-resourced company, with multiple promising lines of business and a seasoned leadership team to help them grow [.] The need for high-quality data for AI models remains significant, and with the largest network of experts training AI, we are set up well to help model builders keep pushing the frontier of what’s possible. We will also continue to be model-agnostic,” Droege said. Scale AI was founded in 2016 as a startup that labelled mass quantities of data and organised them into datasets required to train AI systems ranging from autonomous vehicles to large language models (LLMs). OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft count among Scale AI’s clients with Meta being one of its biggest customers. However, the Meta deal appears to have caused some unease among Scale’s tech customers. OpenAI said that it has been winding down its partnership with Scale AI since the past six to 12 months, as per a report by CNBC. Google is also cutting ties with the data provider, according to a report by Reuters.
