The Prompt: Meta Eyes Scale AI
Welcome back to The Prompt.
Meta is reportedly planning to acquire a 49% stake in data labelling behemoth Scale AI for $14.8 billion, according to The Information. The deal is slated to place Scale AI's young billionaire CEO Alexandr Wang at a top position inside Meta along with a number of Scale AI employees, who will work in a new AI lab dedicated to developing 'superintelligence'— an AI system that outperforms human capabilities. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly closely involved in assembling the team of AI researchers and has gone to great lengths like setting up a WhatsApp group called 'Recruiting Party,' personally reaching out to potential recruits and rearranging desks for researchers to sit near him, Bloomberg reported. The new lab is part of Meta's efforts to keep up in the cutthroat AI race while wrangling a string of internal issues including employee churn, management problems and delayed or disappointing product releases.
Now let's get into the headlines.
DATA DILEMMAS
Social media network Reddit sued Anthropic for allegedly training its AI models on personal user data without permission, and continuing to do so despite telling Reddit it had stopped, Forbes reported. Reddit was an early mover in capitalizing on its rich reserve of organic human data catalogued in its discussion forums, striking licensing deals with OpenAI and Google. In a lawsuit filed last week, Reddit claimed Anthropic's bot accessed its servers 100,000 times.
BIG PLAYS
ChatGPT will now be able to connect to a crop of external applications such as Google Drive, DropBox and Sharepoint, allowing enterprise users to glean insights from internal documents through the chatbot. It will also be able to access meeting recordings and transcriptions. The announcement was the latest in a series of feature releases intended to increase ChatGPT's functionality and keep people engaged. OpenAI has also reached $10 billion in annualized revenue through sales of its consumer products, CNBC reported.
AI DEAL OF THE WEEK
Young AI coding startup Anysphere has become the face of 'vibe coding' — a phrase coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpthy describing the use of large language models to create applications when the user doesn't necessarily need to know how to program. The nascent startup has raised $900 million at a $9.9 billion valuation and claims to have about $500 million in annualized revenue. The startup is betting that AI is going to dramatically transform software engineering in the next decade, making it magnitudes easier to program applications while eliminating cumbersome aspects of the process like correcting syntax or or debugging code. All a person has to do is press tab and AI completes the line of code for you and jumps to the next spot.
Also of note: Enterprise AI startup Glean raised $150 million in Series F funding at a $7.2 billion valuation. Employees use the company's AI tools to search for internal information and build AI agents (software that can carry out specific tasks end-to-end) that can resolve IT tickets, write performance reviews and help prepare for meetings. Glean claimed to have passed $100 million in annualized revenue in February. (Read our 2023 profile of the company here.)
DEEP DIVE
Runway AI
Throngs of excited moviegoers piled into Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center on Thursday night to be a part of Runway's third annual AI film festival. Cristobal Valenzuela, CEO of the $3.3 billion video and photo generation AI startup, spoke to a crowd of hundreds, asking them to think less about the digital tools and AI software used to make the short films they were about to watch, and instead focus on their human elements.
The winning film, Total Pixel Space by Jacob Adler, is a jumble of both realistic and impossible vivid landscapes like a flying pig, people floating in a city or inside a pool, a bloom of jellyfish and a meerkat donning a bright yellow turtleneck. The 9 minute 28 second film raises the question of how many images could possibly exist in the world. The answer: Every image is composed of thousands of pixels— coordinates of positions and colors, a coalition of numbers. The film was selected from 6000 submissions, up from 300 a year ago, as interest in experimenting with AI models has exploded over the years.
For all the creative benefits of video generation AI software, TV networks and filmmakers are adopting the technology for a more pragmatic reason: to produce and edit both television shows and movies quickly and more cheaply. AMC Network, which has produced popular shows like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, recently announced its plans to use Runway's AI models to create marketing and TV content. Lionsgate, the studio behind blockbuster hits like The Hunger Games and The Twilight Saga, has a partnership with Runway to use its models with a goal of making films on a fraction of the budget.
But several studios don't want to openly admit they're using AI due to fears of backlash from creatives, who have voiced their concerns that these AI models are trained on copyrighted data scraped from the internet without consent and compensation. Runway is also currently facing litigation from a group of artists who claim their data was illicitly used to train its AI models.
WEEKLY DEMO
The Department of Government Efficiency developed a faulty AI tool to review thousands of contracts at the Department of Veteran Affairs that could be cut, labelling them as 'munchable,' Propublica reported. The software, developed by a programmer who has no formal experience in AI, was prone to making errors such as hallucinating the size of contracts, misreading them and inflating their value.
MODEL BEHAVIOR
Autonomous vehicles became easy targets during protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in Los Angeles over the weekend. At least five Waymo driverless vehicles that were in the area were vandalized and set ablaze amid the protests. After the incident, Waymo halted its service in parts of downtown LA.
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4 minutes ago
Meta invests $14.3B in AI firm Scale and recruits its CEO for 'superintelligence' team
Meta is making a $14.3 billion investment in artificial intelligence company Scale and recruiting its CEO Alexandr Wang to join a team developing 'superintelligence' at the tech giant. The deal announced Thursday reflects a push by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to revive AI efforts at the parent company of Facebook and Instagram as it faces tough competition from rivals such as Google and OpenAI. Meta announced what it called a 'strategic partnership and investment' with Scale late Thursday. Scale said the $14.3 billion investment puts its market value at over $29 billion. Scale said it will remain an independent company but the agreement will 'substantially expand Scale and Meta's commercial relationship.' Meta will hold a 49% stake in the startup. Wang, though leaving for Meta with a small group of other Scale employees, will remain on Scale's board of directors. Replacing him is a new interim Scale CEO Jason Droege, who was previously the company's chief strategy officer and had past executive roles at Uber Eats and Axon. Zuckerberg's increasing focus on the abstract idea of 'superintelligence' — which rival companies call artificial general intelligence, or AGI — is the latest pivot for a tech leader who in 2021 went all-in on the idea of the metaverse, changing the company's name and investing billions into advancing virtual reality and related technology. It won't be the first time since ChatGPT's 2022 debut sparked an AI arms race that a big tech company has gobbled up talent and products at innovative AI startups without formally acquiring them. Microsoft hired key staff from startup Inflection AI, including co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who now runs Microsoft's AI division. Google pulled in the leaders of AI chatbot company while Amazon made a deal with San Francisco-based Adept that sent its CEO and key employees to the e-commerce giant. Amazon also got a license to Adept's AI systems and datasets. Wang was a 19-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and co-founder Lucy Guo started Scale in 2016. They won influential backing that summer from the startup incubator Y Combinator, which was led at the time by Sam Altman, now the CEO of OpenAI. Wang dropped out of MIT, following a trajectory similar to that of Zuckerberg, who quit Harvard University to start Facebook more than a decade earlier. Scale's pitch was to supply the human labor needed to improve AI systems, hiring workers to draw boxes around a pedestrian or a dog in a street photo so that self-driving cars could better predict what's in front of them. General Motors and Toyota have been among Scale's customers. What Scale offered to AI developers was a more tailored version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which had long been a go-to service for matching freelance workers with temporary online jobs. More recently, the growing commercialization of AI large language models — the technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama — brought a new market for Scale's annotation teams. The company claims to service 'every leading large language model,' including from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft, by helping to fine tune their training data and test their performance. It's not clear what the Meta deal will mean for Scale's other customers. Wang has also sought to build close relationships with the U.S. government, winning military contracts to supply AI tools to the Pentagon and attending President Donald Trump's inauguration. The head of Trump's science and technology office, Michael Kratsios, was an executive at Scale for the four years between Trump's first and second terms. Meta has also begun providing AI services to the federal government. Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its rivals, releasing its flagship Llama system for free as an open-source product that enables people to use and modify some of its key components. Meta says more than a billion people use its AI products each month, but it's also widely seen as lagging behind competitors such as OpenAI and Google in encouraging consumer use of large language models, also known as LLMs. It hasn't yet released its purportedly most advanced model, Llama 4 Behemoth, despite previewing it in April as "one of the smartest LLMs in the world and our most powerful yet.' Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who in 2019 was a winner of computer science's top prize for his pioneering AI work, has expressed skepticism about the tech industry's current focus on large language models. 'How do we build AI systems that understand the physical world, that have persistent memory, that can reason and can plan?' LeCun asked at a French tech conference last year. These are all characteristics of intelligent behavior that large language models 'basically cannot do, or they can only do them in a very superficial, approximate way,' LeCun said. Instead, he emphasized Meta's interest in 'tracing a path towards human-level AI systems, or perhaps even superhuman.' When he returned to France's annual VivaTech conference again on Wednesday, LeCun dodged a question about the pending Scale deal but said his AI research team's plan has 'always been to reach human intelligence and go beyond it.' 'It's just that now we have a clearer vision for how to accomplish this,' he said. LeCun co-founded Meta's AI research division more than a decade ago with Rob Fergus, a fellow professor at New York University. Fergus later left for Google but returned to Meta last month after a 5-year absence to run the research lab, replacing longtime director Joelle Pineau. Fergus wrote on LinkedIn last month that Meta's commitment to long-term AI research 'remains unwavering' and described the work as 'building human-level experiences that transform the way we interact with technology.'
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LinkedIn's founder says Gen Z graduates are 'enormously attractive' to employers for one reason
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Reddit is making it easier to gauge the impact your comments are having. The company is introducing detailed analytics for comments that measure views and other engagement metrics. Reddit shared the change as part of a larger batch of updates around how it handles comments on its platform. Comment insights will provide details around upvotes (including the ratio of upvotes to downvotes), replies, views, shares and awards. Additionally, Redditors will now be able to share comments as a standalone post on Reddit. The platform is also adding a drafts feature for comments that will allow people to save up to 20 drafts for 14 days. Drafts will automatically save, according to Reddit, so that you can revisit your thoughts if you navigate away from the page or leave the app mid-comment. In an update to moderators , Reddit said that drafts is "still in its early iteration" and that it may tweak how the feature works in future versions. The changes are the latest way Reddit has added more flexibility around comments in recent weeks. Earlier this month, the company said it would allow users to hide their commenting history from their profiles.
