Zuckerberg Plans to Invest Heavily in Scale AI
The AI arms race is heating up, with reports suggesting that Meta is preparing to invest billions of dollars in Scale AI, potentially setting a record for the company’s largest investment in the AI field, and marking one of the highest amounts ever raised by a private company.
Scale AI is an American AI company focused on “Data Labeling” and “AI Training Data Processing,” founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo. Its core business is providing high-quality labeled data for AI model training to top global technology companies (such as OpenAI, NVIDIA, Tesla, Meta, Microsoft, etc.) and government agencies.
Funding Estimated at $10 Billion, but Deal Not Confirmed
According to Bloomberg, Meta is in talks to potentially invest billions of dollars in Scale AI, with the scale possibly reaching $10 billion. However, the terms of the deal have not yet been finalized and may still change.
Currently, there are no details disclosed about this transaction, but the news reflects CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s strong commitment to investing in AI. He stated in January this year that Meta would invest up to $65 billion in AI this year.
Zuckerberg mentioned earlier this year that they would invest $65 billion in AI this year.
Image / Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook
Scale AI primarily provides data labeling services, with clients including companies like OpenAI and Microsoft. Both Microsoft and Meta have previously participated in funding for the company. In April of this year, there were reports that Scale AI was planning a tender offer with a valuation of $25 billion, and the current news seems to indicate that this plan is still progressing.
So, what is data labeling service? In simple terms, it involves precisely labeling raw images, videos, text, sensor data, etc., through both manual and automated methods, converting them into formats that AI can learn from.
These labeled data will be widely used in self-driving cars, language models (such as ChatGPT), image recognition, content moderation, robotics, and more. Therefore, Scale AI is hailed as the “TSMC of AI data” or the “data factory behind AI models,” serving as an indispensable infrastructure for emerging AI technologies such as generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and self-driving vehicles.
Who is Alexandr Wang?
Alexandr Wang, who dropped out of MIT in 2016, co-founded Scale AI. He is a second-generation Chinese immigrant with exceptional talent and passion for mathematics and computer programming from a young age. In his teens, he briefly worked at the question-and-answer platform Quora and the quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading.
Scale AI provides quality AI training data that has been labeled for enterprises, with many well-known tech giants as its clients.
Image / Scale AI Official Website
Currently serving as CEO, Wang has stated that Scale AI’s mission is to solve the “least sexy” problems in the AI field. Scale AI employs over 100,000 contract workers worldwide to label various training data. This nearly barrier-free work has attracted many laborers from low-income areas to work remotely, but it has also embroiled the company in controversies regarding sweatshop labor. Last year and early this year, the company faced three accusations of requiring employees to handle psychologically and physically harmful content, such as animal carcasses and pornography, without providing any psychological support.
However, Wang believes that Scale AI’s importance in the AI field is no less than that of NVIDIA, stating, “Our indispensability in AI is on par with NVIDIA.” Scale AI’s revenue reached $870 million last year, and it is expected to double to $2 billion by 2025, demonstrating astonishing growth.
It is worth noting that Scale AI and Meta also share common interests in defense technology, having collaborated on developing military AI models called Defense Llama, and both have established partnerships with defense technology company Anduril.
Faced with increasingly fierce competition in AI, Scale AI serves as an unignorable behind-the-scenes supporter of AI training, and Meta’s investment reflects their ambitious development plans in the AI field.
This article is a collaborative reprint from: Digital Age
Sources: Bloomberg, TechCrunch
The initial draft of this article was written by AI, edited by: Chen Jianjun
Responsible editor: Li Xiantai