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Miami Herald
18 minutes ago
- Miami Herald
Meta commits absurd money to top Google, Microsoft in critical race
Apparently, Meta Platforms (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been up to more than just making the rounds on the podcast circuit. In recent months, the man behind the company that runs Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Oculus has been on seemingly every manosphere podcast out there. Related: Facebook (Meta) makes a big deal with UFC In May, he debuted yet another new look on This Past Weekend with Theo Von, where he talked about how college doesn't do a good job of preparing people for their careers. In January, he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to speak about online censorship, the Covid vaccine, bots on Facebook, and encrypted messaging, among other things. More recently, he spoke with Ben Thompson of Stratechery about AI and where he sees social media going in the future. More on Meta: Meta (Facebook) shocks retail world with unexpected newsMeta quietly plans rude awakening for employees after layoffsSurprising earnings send Meta Platforms stock soaring While the interviews are great at increasing Zuckerberg's profile, they don't do much to move the needle for investors looking for Meta to debut its next big thing. For years, Zuckerberg's focus was the metaverse, but after tens of billions of dollars and years of development, the project hasn't gained the user base Meta was hoping for. Meta's Horizon Worlds virtual social platform had less than 200,000 monthly active users shortly after its launch in 2022, well short of the company's expectations of 500,000 users. Meta has shifted its focus to AI growth in recent years, and on Tuesday, a new report shows just how serious the company has become about topping its rivals. Mark Zuckerberg is applying the same focus he brought to building the metaverse to building out Meta's artificial intelligence capabilities. Zuckerberg is personally overseeing the creation of a "superintelligence" team, and the company is offering nine-figure compensation packages to attract top talent, according to a Bloomberg report. He believes Meta can beat competitors like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI to achieve artificial general intelligence. AGI is the theoretical limit of what AI can achieve - machines performing tasks as well as, or better than, humans. Related: Gig work CEO warns of scary future for job seekers Bloomberg reported that the superteam will feature about 50 people, most of whom Zuckerberg will recruit personally. He's arranged the desks at the company's headquarters so the new staff will sit near him. The team is only one aspect of Meta's AGI strategy. According to a report in The Information on Tuesday, Meta is close to finalizing a $15 billion investment in Scale AI. If completed, the deal would become the company's largest-ever acquisition. Scale AI provides training data to everyone from Microsoft to Google to OpenAI. The investment would give Meta a 49% stake in the company, and CEO Alesandr Wang would join the superteam. The push for artificial intelligence that can perform tasks as well as or better than humans will inevitably lead to societal upheaval. The most immediate concern is about the jobs that will be lost to automation. When big companies like Meta and Alphabet want to save on costs, headcount is often one of the first places they look. Meta is currently laying off about 3,600 employees, whom the company says are underperforming. The company says it is eliminating redundancies, and it's true the tech sector went on a hiring spree during the pandemic. Now, however, it is replacing many of those positions with machine learning engineers. Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence focused on enabling machines to learn from data without explicit programming from humans. In other words, Meta has been laying off workers to hire other workers to build products, which will eventually lead to more layoffs. Related: Meta turns to powerful ally in battle against Europe The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.
Washington Post
an hour ago
- Washington Post
Meta takes $15 billion stake in Scale AI in bid to catch competitors
Meta has agreed to pay $14.8 billion for a 49 percent stake in the AI data firm Scale AI in one of the biggest acquisitions the social media giant has made since its 2014 deal to buy WhatsApp, according to a person familiar with the matter. The arrangement with Scale AI, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, will give the start-up's CEO, Alexandr Wang, a senior position at Meta leading a team focused on developing super intelligence, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private company matters.
CNBC
2 hours ago
- CNBC
Zuckerberg makes his biggest AI bet as Meta nears $14 billion stake in Scale AI, hires founder Wang
Mark Zuckerberg is so frustrated with Meta's standing in artificial intelligence that he's willing to spend billions of dollars to convince Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to join his company, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. Meta is finalizing a deal to invest $14 billion into Scale AI, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the terms are confidential. Bloomberg reported earlier this week that an investment could top $10 billion, and a story from The Information on Tuesday said Meta would pay close to $15 billion. As a founder of one of the most prominent AI startups, Wang has built a reputation as an ambitious leader who both understands AI's technical complexities and how to build a business that's not merely focused on research, according to two former Meta AI employees who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. Zuckerberg will be counting on Wang to better execute Meta's AI ambitions following the lukewarm launch of the company's latest Llama AI models. By not directly acquiring Scale AI, Meta appears to be taking a similar strategy as companies like Google and Microsoft, which have brought in prominent leaders in AI from the startups and Inflection AI by taking large stakes in those companies rather than buying them outright. Meta is currently on trial against the Federal Trade Commission for antitrust claims, and the company doesn't want to further upset regulators by acquiring Scale AI, multiple people familiar with the matter said. As part of the deal, Meta will take a 49% stake in the data-labelling and annotation startup, The Information reported, while Wang will help lead a new AI research lab at the social networking company and will be joined by some of his colleagues. The New York Times was first to report about the new AI lab. Scale AI, founded in 2016, has made a splash in the era of generative AI by helping major tech companies like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft prepare data they use to train cutting-edge AI models. Meta is one of Scale AI's biggest customers, according to two people familiar with the matter. The startup, valued in a funding round about a year ago at $14 billion, is number 28 on CNBC's Disruptor 50 list. In mid-2024, the company signed one of the biggest recent commercial leases in San Francisco, gobbling up about 180,000 square feet of space in a downtown building that had been occupied by Airbnb. Scale AI has increasingly made in-roads into the defense industry, and in March announced a multimillion dollar deal with the Department of Defense. In November, it collaborated with Meta on Defense Llama, a custom version of Meta's open-source Llama foundation model designed specifically to "support American national security missions," the company said in a blog post. Meta and Scale AI declined to comment. Heading into 2025, AI was one of Meta's top priorities. But Zuckerberg has grown agitated that rivals like OpenAI appear to be ahead in both underlying AI models and consumer-facing apps, current and former Meta employees said. Zuckerberg has been deprioritizing its Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit, or FAIR, in favor of its more product-oriented GenAI team to help Meta make headway in AI and improve its Llama family of AI models, CNBC previously reported. Meta's release of its Llama 4 AI models in April was not well received by developers, further frustrating Zuckerberg, the people said. At the time, Meta only released two smaller versions of Llama 4 and said it would eventually release a bigger and more powerful "Behemoth" model. That model has yet to be made available due to Zuckerberg's concerns about its capabilities relative to competing models, the people said. In particular, there is concern about how Behemoth stacks up against the latest from companies like OpenAI and China's DeepSeek, whose models are preferred by the wider developer community. Following Llama 4's lackluster debut, Meta conducted a reorganization of its GenAI unit, splitting it into two. Connor Hayes, a longstanding Meta employee, was put in charge of AI Products, while AGI Foundations was given to Amir Frenkel, previously a vice president of engineering and product for Meta's Reality Labs hardware unit, and Ahmad Al-Dahle, the previous head of GenAI. Al-Dahle's new position as a co-leader was seen as a sign that Zuckerberg had lost confidence in him, the people said. Zuckerberg admires Wang and considers him capable of a major role at Meta as an AI leader, the people said. A dropout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wang has built a sizable business and is familiar with AI's technical intricacies. The people described Wang as a "wartime CEO" who is in line with Zuckerberg's position that the U.S. faces increasing competition from China, thus requiring help from the tech industry. Wang told CNBC in January that he believes there is an "AI war" between the U.S. and China, and that the U.S. will need more computing power in order to compete. "The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure," Wang said at the time. "We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom." It's an unusual move for Zuckerberg, who has traditionally put loyalists in high-ranking positions. But it shows the magnitude of the moment and Zuckerberg's belief that a prominent outsider like Wang may be better positioned than any current Meta employee to bolster the company's position in AI, the people said. Wang also brings a lot of outside knowledge of how competitors like OpenAI are building their consumer chatbots and AI models. Data labelling and training has become more complicated in recent years as the capabilities of AI models has increased, said Vahan Petrosyan, the CEO of SuperAnnotate, one of Scale AI's competitors. "I would say Scale have covered probably 70% of all the models that are built," Petrosyan said. With Wang and others from Scale AI, Meta could gain "collective intelligence on how to build a better ChatGPT.""When Meta is buying them, they're buying their intelligence," Petrosyan said.
