Meta makes $14.3bn bid for superintelligence

Meta is making a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. The deal sees Mark Zuckerberg’s company acquire 49% of the data labelling start-up, whose CEO, Alexandr Wang will take a top position inside a team developing “superintelligence” at the tech giant. Scale will remain an independent company but the agreement, which is described as a strategic partnership, will substantially expand commercial relationship between the two parties.

Founded in 2016, Scale provides labelled data or curated training data required to support the development of AI large language models (LLM’s). The company has become a significant player in the data collection industry by amassing a global workforce of contractors capable of generating high-quality input. Scale provides services to the vast majority the companies in the top echelon of the AI sector and its clients have also included General Motors and Toyota.

The announcement of the collaboration, which comes just two months on from Meta’s unveiling of its Llama 4 family of AI models (see here),  appears to be an attempt by Meta to regain the initiative in the AI arena. The billions that the company has ploughed unsuccessfully into the concept of the Metaverse has left it lagging behind many of its competitors in the AI space. The focus of the partnership on superintelligence (the type of AI capable of performing better than humans at all tasks) points to a push to get to the forefront of the next wave of technological development. With this dawn still many years away, however, Meta’s investment in Scale looks more like the latest example of consolidation in the AI market.

Posted by: Duncan Aitchison at 10:11

Tags: investment   AI