The parent company of Facebook is investing nearly $15 billion to get a 49 percent stake in AI data preparation company Scale AI, and it’s also building what it calls “superintelligence,” which is an AI system that supposedly exceeds the power of the human brain, according to multiple reports.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, appears to be making a big AI play with a massive investment in Scale AI.
The Information Tuesday reported that Meta has agreed to take a 49 percent stake worth $14.8 billion in Scale AI. Along with the acquisition, Meta will also get Scale AI’s CEO, Alexandr Wang.
News of a possible acquisition of Scale AI comes on the heels of other reports from the New York Times, CNBC, and others, that Meta is forming a new AI research lab focused on what it calls “superintelligence,” and that Wang is supposedly joining that lab as its leader.
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“Superintelligence” is a hypothetical AI system that “exceeds the powers of the human brain,” according to the Times.
The lab and the investment are part of a move by Meta to reorganize its AI efforts as the company has invested billions of dollars into remaking itself as an AI powerhouse, the Times wrote.
Neither Meta nor Scale AI responded to CRN requests for further information.
Scale AI is the developer of the Scale Data Engine, a technology for collecting, curating, and annotating data to train and evaluate AI models. It is in use by multiple international machine learning teams to help accelerate their AI model development. Customers include OpenAI, robotics company Nuro, and Harvard University.
The company also provides the ability to customize, evaluate, and deploy specialized AI agents for mission-critical workflows for customers including the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force, as well as to optimize LLM performance for domain-specific use cases using its RAG (retrieval augmented generation) pipelines.
