Meta is paying $14.3 billion to buy 49-percent of Scale AI and hire its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to reboot its troubled AI efforts.
As part of the deal, Wang will report directly to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, both companies announced on Thursday. He will lead a new AI lab inside Meta tasked with building “superintelligence” and remain on Scale’s board of directors. “We will share more about this effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks,” Meta spokesperson Ashley Zandy said in a statement.
Zuckerberg has been actively recruiting a new team of researchers from rival firms to work for Wang’s new team, according to people familiar with the matter and other press reports. The Meta founder has reached out to would-be recruits directly — usually via a cold email or WhatsApp message — and lured some of them from companies like Google with seven and eight-figure compensation packages.
Scale works with Google, OpenAI, and others to help train their models by having humans annotate and label the data that feeds them. Most of that work is done through low-cost labor outside of the US, and it has become a critical component of AI development. With Wang going to Meta, Scale is naming a new CEO: Jason Droege, its former chief strategy officer.
“We’ve grown to over 1,500 people and become the trusted partner for model builders, enterprises, and governments building and deploying the smartest Al tools and applications,” Wang said in a memo to Scale employees. “Scale is now one of the most impactful companies in the world, accelerating the development of what may be the most important technology in human history. Today, we are announcing a massive new investment from Meta. This is a major milestone and a powerful validation of the hard work you’ve all put into Scale’s mission.”
He added that the “proceeds from Meta’s investment will be distributed to those of you who are shareholders and vested equity holders, while maintaining the opportunity to continue participating in our future growth as ongoing equity holders.”
Since the disappointing debut of Llama 4 earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been eager to catch up with competitors like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek. Llama 4’s release was delayed multiple times, and then Meta was caught gaming a public leaderboard to make the model appear better than it actually was. The company has still not released Llama 4 Behemoth, its largest and most expensive version that was teased in April.
Last month, Zuckerberg said that two of Meta’s top priorities for 2025 are making its ChatGPT rival, Meta AI, “the leading personal AI” and “building full general intelligence.” He recently stated that Meta AI has reached one billion monthly users, although the prominence of the assistant across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook heavily influences this number.
In April, Meta released a standalone app for Meta AI, featuring a social feed that showcases how people are using it. The app briefly reached the top of the App Store but hasn’t sustained that level of popularity.
This story is developing…
