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Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab

#191

Post by andytratt »

tyre wrote: post #157
DebtDeflation wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a wild story for sure. Dropped out of MIT after freshman year and starts Scale to do data labeling. Three years later Scale has a $1B valuation and two years after that Wang is the world's youngest billionaire. Nine years after Scale's founding they're still doing less than $1B in annual revenue. Yet Meta is doing a $14B acquihire. There's definitely more than meets the eye. I suspect it involves multiple world…

> Dropped out of MIT after freshman year and starts Scale to do data labeling I was in their YC batch, so two notes: 1. He didn't start it himself 2. They weren't doing data labeling when they entered YC. They pivoted to this.

nor did he finish it himself. the Scale team has always been extremely talent-dense.

but execution is everything, and Alex has certainly been the dictator executing without peer or co-leads for over half a decade now.

"API for human labor" a la MTurk was the original idea, was it not? pretty close to the data labeling thesis.

Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab

#193

Post by paxys »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #109

My mother is 73. She uses Meta AI a lot. Her friends do too. Maybe Zuck knows what he is doing.

Because he put a big "AI" button on every single one of Meta's apps and surfaces. I'd bet that most of the usage is accidental. Great way to show inflated user counts in your earnings reports and get some directors promoted, sure, but not a long term strategy.

Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab

#194

Post by whitej125 »

bix6 wrote: post #7

This is a weird deal? Meta buys a non-controlling stake and says no customers will be affected but the CEO and others are leaving Scale for Meta. Meta also says they won’t have access to competitor data but at 49% ownership they get major investor rights? Sounds like an acqui-kill to me?

Likely to steer clear of regulatory scrutiny or approval processes (specifically FTC and DOJ).

Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab

#195

Post by JoshTko »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #23
lucaslazarus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strikes me more as an attempt to maintain plausible deniability if/when the FTC comes knocking

The FTC will do nothing. Not under Trump.

Competitors just need to lobby sufficiently to get action

Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab

#197

Post by lr4444lr »

akudha wrote: post #84
paxys wrote: post #79

Spending $15B to hire a 28 year old to build you some AI is certainly a move. You can call Zuck many things, but "afraid to take risks" isn't one of them.

What is the big risk here? He has the cash to burn and he has full control of his position. Nothing will happen to him if he wastes a few Billions. He is not some poor single mom who has to decide between fixing her car and paying for kid’s Christmas presents

The risk is the lost time by betting on the wrong horse. I don't know much about Wang, but the current phase of the AI race will likely shake out winners and losers of the tech industry who persist for many years to come.

Being first to achieve certain milestones matters a lot.

Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab

#198

Post by RankingMember »

shermantanktop wrote: post #161
RankingMember wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billionaires don't stop caring about looking like dumbasses just because they're extremely wealthy.

Maybe, but it doesn’t seem to stop them from actually looking like dumbasses. But that wealth attracts fans who constantly proclaim that their latest idea is brilliant. Maybe we should pity the poor billionaires, hopped up on T or ketamine and trapped in an echo chamber…but I’ll think they’ll be ok.

In the case of Musk, I almost suspect he has some kind of humiliation fetish.

Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab

#199

Post by jordanb »

imiric wrote: post #137
laborcontract wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk here is that you've now put a person with no track record of success outside of being good at sales in charge of your AI efforts. You're betting that he's going to be the one to attract talent. The right leadership might be able to get talent to work for a discount. The wrong one would lead to talent not coming at all.

If Meta is known for anything besides user privacy violations it's for taking risks that often pay off. They were laughed at for overpaying for Instagram and Whatsapp, yet both were instrumental to their current success. Their continued bet on VR is still highly criticized, yet they were the first Big Tech company in the space, they're the current market leaders, and I'm sure it will have huge ROI in the near future.…

> often pay off

alrite

> laughed at for overpaying for Instagram and Whatsapp

That's not how it went down. They were laughed at for screwing up so badly that these apps were drinking their milkshake, and then they panicked and paid way more than any fundamental analysis would price these apps at, because they weren't actually buying an app, they were paying a ransom on their monopoly.

> Their continued bet on VR is still highly criticized

Because Zuckerberg thinks people are going to go around wearing his face hugger.

> and I'm sure it will have huge ROI in the near future

The "VR play" is predicated upon VR somehow taking even more time away from its users than cellphones do. The only way it works is if people put it on when they wake up and take it off when they go to bed. Heck, maybe leave it on in some kind of REM-mode so zuck can put ads in our dreams.

Meta "succeeds" as you demonstrated, when they wait for someone else to outflank them, mostly by not being Meta because Meta is creepy and nobody likes it, and then they fire a money bomb at at. The way for VR could have succeeded is if Occulus stayed independent and focused on gaming where it shines for another decade, and then as people start to feel like it could be a building block for something more, snatch it out from under them. Instead Zuck bought it too early and smothered it with his empire of ick.

Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab

#200

Post by mattlondon »

rybosome wrote: post #124
krosaen wrote: post #92

Anyone know what scale does these days beyond labeling tools that would make them this interesting to Meta? Data labeling tools seem more of a traditional software application and not much to do with AI models themselves that would be somewhat easily replicated, but guessing my impression is out of date. Also now apparently their CEO is leaving [1], so the idea that they were super impressed with him doesn't seem to…

Scale has also built massive amounts of proprietary datasets that they license to the big players in training. Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. all use Scale data in training. So, the play I’m guessing is to shut that tap off for everyone else now, and double down on using Scale to generate more proprietary datasets.

I wondered that.

But then huge revenue streams for Scale basically disappear immediately.

Is it worth Meta spending all that money just to stop competitors using Scale? There are competitors who I am sure would be very eager to get the money from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic etc that was previously going to Scale. So Meta spends all that money for basically nothing because the competitors will just fill the gap if Scale is turned-down.

I am guessing they are just buying stuff to try to be more "vertically integrated" or whatever (remember that Facebook recently got caught pirating books etc).

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