Meta has just placed a $14.3 billion bet on the data recovery company Scale AI, but that’s not a traditional acquisition. Meta will acquire a 49% stake in the company and add Scale co-founder, Alexandre Wang, to the team.
The move shows the urgency of the meta to keep up with AI races, even if strategies to compete with heavyweights like Openai and Google are still a bit confusing.
Today, TechCrunch’s equity podcast involves Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff and Anthony HA breaking their contracts and digging into interviews from Kirsten’s archives featuring early predictions for AI from Kirsten’s archives, asking if Meta actually buys the game chagar or adds a deal maker that was treated as featured when the AI is still falling down.
Listen to the entire episode and hear more of the week’s highlights, such as:
How Chime’s IPO priced above expectations at $27 per share and jumped in early trading, and Anthony’s not-so-hot takes on what this signals for the tech IPO market Why Y Combinator’s Demo Day was packed with “agentic” AI startups building autonomous software, and how a recent chat with Fiverr’s CEO sheds light on AI-driven task automation in the gig economy How Jony Ive’s LoveFrom spend 18 months quietly is a spin-out product that has been confirmed to have a form factor like a bicycle, working with Libian on the first electric bike.
Equity will be back next week, so stay tuned!
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast produced by Teresa Loconsolo, posted every Wednesday and Friday.
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