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Meta is reportedly investing nearly $15 billion<\/a> in the data-labeling firm Scale AI and taking a 49% stake in the startup, while also bringing on CEO Alexandr Wang to help lead a new \u201csuperintelligence\u201d lab within the company.<\/p>\n The deal is reminiscent of Meta\u2019s previous large and risky bets, such as its $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp<\/a> and its $1 billion Instagram purchase<\/a>. At the time those mergers closed, many people suggested Meta had grossly overpaid for the platforms \u2014 and today\u2019s discourse is no different. There\u2019s no shortage of investors and founders who were left scratching their heads this weekend over Meta\u2019s latest tie-up.<\/p>\n In the end, WhatsApp and Instagram became an integral part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s empire. The question is whether the Scale AI deal will similarly work in Meta\u2019s favor, proving Zuckerberg\u2019s prescient strategy yet again, or whether the company is grasping at straws in a misguided effort to catch up to rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.<\/p>\n In this case, Meta isn\u2019t betting on an emerging social media app, but on the data used to train top AI models. For the last several years, leading AI labs such as OpenAI have relied on Scale AI to produce and label data that\u2019s used to train models. In recent months, Scale AI and its data annotation competitors have started hiring highly skilled people, such as PhD scientists and senior software engineers, to generate high-quality data for frontier AI labs.<\/p>\n It may benefit Meta to have a close relationship with a data provider like Scale. Meta\u2019s leaders have complained about a lack of innovation around data in the company\u2019s leading AI teams, according to a person familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, Meta\u2019s generative AI unit launched Llama 4, a family of AI models<\/a> that failed to match the capabilities of Chinese AI lab DeepSeek\u2019s models and that was broadly seen as a disappointment. Not helping matters, Meta is trying to combat an attrition problem. According to data compiled by SignalFire, Meta lost 4.3% of its top talent to AI labs<\/a> in 2024.<\/p>\n Meta isn\u2019t betting on only Scale AI to reignite its AI efforts, but also on Wang to lead the aforementioned new superintelligence team. The 28-year-old CEO has proven himself to be a strong startup founder \u2014 he\u2019s known around Silicon Valley to be ambitious, a good salesman, and very well-connected. Over the past few months, Wang has been meeting with world leaders<\/a> to discuss AI\u2019s impact on society.<\/p>\n Wang hasn\u2019t led an AI lab of this sort before, however, and he doesn\u2019t have the same AI research background that many other AI lab leaders do, like Safe Superintelligence\u2019s Ilya Sutskever or Mistral\u2019s Arthur Mensch. That\u2019s perhaps why Meta is also said to be recruiting high-profile talent like DeepMind\u2019s Jack Rae<\/a> to round out its new AI research group.<\/p>\n The post-acquisition fate of Scale AI the company is a bit murky. The role of real-world data in AI model training is changing \u2014 some AI labs have brought data collection efforts in-house, while others have increased their reliance on synthetic (i.e., AI-generated) data. In April, The Information reported that Scale AI had missed some of its revenue targets<\/a>.<\/p>\n According to Anyscale co-founder Robert Nishihara, several frontier AI labs are exploring novel ways to leverage and optimize data, many of which are quite compute-intensive.<\/p>\n \u201cData is a moving target,\u201d Nishihara told TechCrunch in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s not just a finite effort to catch up \u2014 you have to innovate.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible that Meta and Wang\u2019s relationship could scare off other AI labs that have traditionally worked with Scale AI. If so, this deal could be a boon for Scale AI\u2019s competitors, such as Turing, Surge AI, and even nonconventional data providers such as the recently launched LM Arena. <\/p>\n Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth told TechCrunch via email that he\u2019s received increased interest from customers in light of the rumors around Meta\u2019s deal with Scale AI.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there will be some clients who will prefer to work with a partner that\u2019s more neutral,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Only time will tell how Meta\u2019s investment will pan out for its AI efforts, but the company has significant ground to make up. Meanwhile, the competition isn\u2019t slowing down. OpenAI is gearing up for the release of its next flagship model, GPT-5, as well as its first openly available model in years \u2014 a model that\u2019ll compete with Meta\u2019s current and future Llama releases.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n