Meta Set to Throw Billions at Startup That Leads AI Data Market
Three months after the Chinese artificial intelligence developer DeepSeek upended the tech world with a model that rivaled America's best, a 28-year-old AI executive named Alexandr Wang came to Capitol Hill to tell policymakers what they needed to do to maintain US dominance.
The US, Wang said at the April hearing, needs to establish a 'national AI data reserve,' supply enough power for data centers and avoid an onerous patchwork of state-level rules. Lawmakers welcomed his feedback. 'It's good to see you again here in Washington,' Republican Representative Neal Dunn of Florida said. 'You're becoming a regular up here.'
Wang, the chief executive officer of Scale AI, may not be a household name in the same way OpenAI's Sam Altman has become. But he and his company have gained significant influence in tech and policy circles in recent years. Scale uses an army of contractors to label the data that tech firms such as Meta Platforms Inc. and OpenAI use to train and improve their AI models, and helps companies make custom AI applications. Increasingly, it's enlisting PhDs, nurses and other experts with advanced degrees to help develop more sophisticated models, according to a person familiar with the matter. Put simply: The three pillars of AI are chips, talent and data. And Scale is a dominant player in the last of those.
Now, the startup's stature is set to grow even more. Meta is in talks to make a multibillion-dollar investment in Scale, Bloomberg News reported over the weekend. The financing may exceed $10 billion in value, making it one of the largest private company funding events of all time. The startup was valued at about $14 billion in 2024, as part of a funding round that included backing from Meta.
In many ways, Scale's rise mirrors that of OpenAI. Both companies were founded roughly a decade ago and bet that the industry was then on the cusp of what Wang called an ' inflection point of AI. ' Their CEOs, who are friends and briefly lived together, are both adept networkers and have served as faces of the AI sector before Congress. And OpenAI, too, has been on the receiving end of an 11-figure investment from a large tech firm.
Scale's trajectory has shaped, and been shaped by, the AI boom that OpenAI unleashed. In its early years, Scale focused more on labeling images of cars, traffic lights and street signs to help train the models used to build self-driving cars. But it has since helped to annotate and curate the massive amounts of text data needed to build the so-called large language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT. These models learn by drawing patterns from the data and their respective labels.
At times, that work has made Scale a lightning rod for criticisms about the unseen workforce in places such as Kenya and the Philippines that supports AI development. Scale has faced scrutiny for relying on thousands of contractors overseas who were paid relatively little to weed through reams of online data, with some saying they have suffered psychological trauma from the content they're asked to review. In a 2019 interview with Bloomberg, Wang said the company's contract workers earn 'good' pay — 'in the 60th to 70th percentile of wages in their geography.'
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