Latest news with #ScaleAI
Daily Mail
37 minutes ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Meet Lucy Guo: The youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world who has officially DETHRONED Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift is no longer the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world thanks to Lucy Guo, who has officially taken the title in Forbes' 10th Anniversary list of America's Richest Self-Made Women. Lucy, 30, is the founder and CEO of Passes, a platform where creators can build a community and directly connect with their fans, offering them things like live streams, one-on-one messaging, and exclusive podcasts. Founded in 2022, the company managed to raise an eye-watering $50 million from investors from over just two years, and its owner is sitting pretty with a cool net worth of $1.3billion. But who is Taylor's dethroner, Lucy Guo? Los Angeles-based Lucy is a college dropout, having quit her degree in computer science and human-computer interactions at Carnegie Mellon University. Before launching Passes, she co-founded the artificial intelligence company Scale AI with Alexander Wang in 2016. Lucy left the business two years later in 2018 holding onto much of her stake, and that same year she made the Forbes' 30 Under 30 list. Shedding light into her bougie life, Lucy shared that she has two properties in her portfolio: one in Los Angeles, California and one in Miami, Florida. 'I have a swanky apartment in Miami and a house in LA which is five minutes away from my office,' she told Fortune in 2023. She also revealed her she commutes to the office 'on an electric skateboard or my assistant drives me.' Lucy is always so swamped with work that she often eats her lunch at her desk. She doesn't buy groceries either, having previously admitted to the publication that she never cook and lives off Uber Eats instead. While Lucy does enjoy some downtime, extended time off from her company is not ever on the cards. 'I've never really had a real vacation,' she told Fortune. 'Even when I'm on vacation I'm working at least eight hours per day.' Outside of work, Lucy is a fitness fanatic and can often be found keeping fit at Barry's Bootcamp, a boutique, high-intensity workout class which she attends twice a day. In April, she celebrated reaching a mind-blowing 3000 classes and credited her 'discipline' over prioritizing sleep as the secret to her achievement. When she's not being put through her paces in the Red Room, Lucy is enjoying music festivals and techno raves. She recently attended this year's Coachella Festival, which took place in April, and also spent two weeks learning to DJ. Lucy turned 30 in October and threw a huge party, which she called Lucypalooza, to celebrate. In a candid post shared on Instagram at the time, she did however admit feeling fearful of the milestone because she is not yet married with children. 'I've always been so scared of this age,' she penned. 'Immigrant Chinese culture instilled in me that I should have kids by 25 and if I weren't married by 30, I would be single forever. 'But every single year keeps getting better. I'm more confident, excited, and motivated than ever before. I have the best friends that anyone could ask for. 'I couldn't be more grateful for the amount of love I have in my life. 'And because Asians don't raisin, every year I'm getting richer AND hotter.' Forbes has today unveiled its 10th Anniversary List of America's Richest Self-Made Women, ranking the country's 100 wealthiest women who have built their own fortunes across industries from manufacturing to tech, entertainment, and finance. Diane Hendricks, cofounder of the ABC Supply tops the list as the country's richest self-made woman for the eighth consecutive year with a real time net worth of $22.3 billion. Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey is 13th on the list with an impressive net worth of $3.1 billion, followed by Kim Kardashian who is 19th on the list with $1.7billion Country superstar Taylor, 35, ranks at 21st with her net worth of $1.6 billion.
USA Today
5 hours ago
- Business
- USA Today
Selena Gomez is one of Forbes' richest self-made women, Rihanna falls on list
Selena Gomez is one of Forbes' richest self-made women, Rihanna falls on list Show Caption Hide Caption Taylor Swift's no longer the youngest self-made billionaire Taylor Swift was once the youngest self-made woman billionaire at 35. The new record holder, according to Forbes, is Lucy Guo, 30, the co-founder of Scale AI. unbranded - Entertainment Forbes has released its annual list of the country's richest self-made women, with new and returning stars who made the cut. The magazine's list, ranking the 100 wealthiest women in America, saw newcomer Selena Gomez make the list, largely due to her stake in cosmetics company Rare Beauty, which she launched in 2020 and is valued at $1.3 billion. Gomez's net worth is estimated at $700 million, and she is one of 16 celebrities to earn a place on the list. (In September, Bloomberg declared Gomez a billionaire, estimating her fortune at $1.3 billion.) Other stars on the list include Kim Kardashian, her sister Kylie Jenner, Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, Reese Witherspoon and Rihanna. The Bajan billionaire took a 30% slide on the list this year, Forbes reports, due to flat sales at Fenty Beauty and her lingerie brand, Savage X Fenty. This story is developing.
TechCrunch
a day ago
- Business
- TechCrunch
Scale AI hires team behind remote developer recruiting platform Pesto AI
Data-labeling startup Scale AI has hired the team behind Pesto AI, which helps companies recruit developers remotely, according to a blog post by one of Pesto's founders. Founded in 2017 by Ayush Jaiswal and Indian food delivery platform Swiggy's co-founder Rahul Jaimini, Pesto AI is backed by the likes of Product Hunt's Ryan Hoover and Gumroad's Sahil Lavingia. According to Crunchbase, it has raised more than $8 million in funding. Pesto will be shutting down its operations. According to its LinkedIn page, Pesto had 71 employees, but it's not clear how many of those are joining Scale AI. 'Earlier this year, I made the exciting decision to join Scale. This move marks the next chapter in a journey I've been deeply passionate about for years—exploring how we can harness the power of AI to create meaningful opportunities for people around the world,' Jaiswal, whose LinkedIn profile says he now is the head of growth at Scale, wrote in the blog post. Previous reporting about Pesto suggests the startup was also involved in educating developers during its early years. Scale AI did not immediately return requests for comment. AI-powered hiring platform, *%@)
The Verge
22-05-2025
- Business
- The Verge
Joshua Dzieza
Another AI data annotation company gets sued. Surge AI is being sued over worker misclassification in California. The class-action suit was brought by the same firm that filed a similar suit against Surge's larger rival, Scale AI, late last year. The complaint alleges that Surge exerts an extremely high level of control over how and when its contractors work and also accuses the company of failing to pay wages for the copious training and testing contractors must perform before being allowed to start on a project. Both of these problems were systemic in the annotation industry when I wrote about them two years ago.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Surge AI is latest San Francisco startup accused of misclassifying its workers
Artificial intelligence training company Surge AI has been hit with a lawsuit alleging it has misclassified contractors hired to improve chat responses from AI software for some of the world's leading tech companies. The proposed class action lawsuit alleges that "data annotators" — hired by Surge AI to ensure that powerful AI systems run by Meta and OpenAI can properly generate text responses that are accurate and capable of mimicking human expressions — were "deliberately" classified as independent contractors, denying them benefits given to employees. In the lawsuit filed Monday, California-based plaintiff Dominique DonJuan Cavalier II, represented by public interest law firm Clarkson, alleged he and other data annotators were made to do unpaid training and were subject to near-impossible time limits for tasks that caused their pay to be docked. San Francisco-based Surge AI, also known as Surge Labs, and its subsidiaries "have reaped enormous profits by deliberately avoiding paying wages and benefits to those performing work that forms the backbone of Defendants' business," the lawsuit alleges. Surge AI did not respond to a request for comment. In recent years, AI data training companies have been accused of mistreating workers abroad in Kenya and elsewhere. But increasingly, as the AI industry balloons, workers in California and nationwide have begun to raise similar complaints. Similar lawsuits have been filed against Scale AI, a larger AI training company that has gathered a vast workforce of contractors to train AI tools for companies, including Open AI and Google, as well as the U.S. Department of Defense. Surge AI has raised some 25 million, according to Crunchbase. The much larger Scale AI is seeking a valuation as high as $25 billion in a potential tender offer, Reuters reported. Plaintiff Steve McKinney, a resident of Newbury Park who was hired by Scale AI's subsidiary Outlier AI as a 'tasker," sued the company in December alleging he was promised a pay rate of $25 per hour but was ultimately paid only a fraction of that amount. Workers who questioned the company's payment practices in internal messaging app Slack were abruptly removed from the app, according to the suit, which was also brought by law firm Clarkson, headquartered in Malibu. Scale AI contractors in January hit the company with a second lawsuit, alleging contractors were made to sift through graphic "depraved images" and emotionally distressing content, and dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological issues as a result. Scale AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A company spokesperson told TechCrunch in March that its work was misunderstood by regulators and others and that the company offers "flexible work opportunities" to Americans. Sign up for our Wide Shot newsletter to get the latest entertainment business news, analysis and insights. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
