Data signing company Size AI confirmed on Friday that it received a “significant” investment from Meta, which values the startup at $29 billion. The startup also said co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang has stepped down from his role, joining Meta and supporting large companies with AI jobs.
According to reports, Meta invested around $14.3 billion in 49% stake in the startup. This generates and labels data used to train large-scale language models that support a significant portion of the generation AI development.
Meta confirmed the investment. “META has completed its strategic partnership and investment in scale AI, and as part of it, we will create production data for the AI model together, and Alexandr Wang will join the Meta to tackle this effort.
Jason Doroge, Scale’s current Chief Strategy Officer, will fly around as interim CEO. Scale AI notes that Meta’s investments will be paid to investors and shareholders and used to grow fuel. The company emphasized that it remains an independent entity. Wang will continue with Datalabelle Company as Director of the Board of Directors.
As my colleague Max Zeff wrote on Wednesday, the investment is how Meta improves AI efforts as rivals Google, Openai and the rush of humanity advances, and social media companies’ own AI models release competition. Additionally, the company lost 4.3% of its top talent to other AI labs last year, according to data from Singalfire.
Over the past few years, leading AI labs such as Openai have relied on scale AI to generate and label the data used to train models. In recent months, Scale AI and its data annotation competitors have begun hiring high-quality people, including PhD scientists and senior software engineers, generating high-quality data for Frontier AI Labs.
Last year, Scale AI raised $1 billion last year at a $13.8 billion valuation from investors including Amazon and Meta.