Meta is reportedly investing nearly $15 billion 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 “superintelligence” lab within the company.
The deal is reminiscent of Meta’s previous large and risky bets, such as its $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp and its $1 billion Instagram purchase. At the time those mergers closed, many people suggested Meta had grossly overpaid for the platforms — and today’s discourse is no different. There’s no shortage of investors and founders who were left scratching their heads this weekend over Meta’s latest tie-up.
In the end, WhatsApp and Instagram became an integral part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s empire. The question is whether the Scale AI deal will similarly work in Meta’s favor, proving Zuckerberg’s 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.
In this case, Meta isn’t 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’s 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.
It may benefit Meta to have a close relationship with a data provider like Scale. Meta’s leaders have complained about a lack of innovation around data in the company’s leading AI teams, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Earlier this year, Meta’s generative AI unit launched Llama 4, a family of AI models that failed to match the capabilities of Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s 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 in 2024.
Meta isn’t 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 — he’s 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 to discuss AI’s impact on society.
Wang hasn’t led an AI lab of this sort before, however, and he doesn’t have the same AI research background that many other AI lab leaders do, like Safe Superintelligence’s Ilya Sutskever or Mistral’s Arthur Mensch. That’s perhaps why Meta is also said to be recruiting high-profile talent like DeepMind’s Jack Rae to round out its new AI research group.
Story Continues