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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

#241

Post by mrweasel »

deviation wrote: post #81

Reminds me of "Don't dig for the gold, sell the shovels". Could also be read: > Meta spends 10% of last year's revenue to acquire 49% of a top AI data company and poach their leadership, to ensure they are a key player in what could be a ~5-trillion dollar industry by 2033. Meta has a history of this. Acquiring Oculus (and leaning in on VR), Ray-Ban partnership (and leaning in on AR)... etc. These all just seem like…

Bringing up Oculus and VR is quite fitting, because I think it's the same problem. Meta is attempting to find their next business, but like with social media they don't really have a plan. It worked out well with Facebook and some of the purchases surrounding social media, but it was never a clear path to profit, so they slapped ads on it.

Why does Meta want VR to work? Create the Meta-verse? We're back at why, what problem does it solve? Same with AI, what's the goal here, besides being an AI company?

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

#242

Post by visarga »

Why link to this copyright maximalist site with paywall? They argued against copyright in 2001 (NYT vs Tasini) when it was in their favor, and recently pro copyright (NYT vs OpenAI) because it was in their ..favor. They want to put restrictions on our creativity, to extend copyright from expression to abstractions. I would not touch it with a 10 foot pole.

https://apnews.com/article/meta-ai-superintelligence-agi-sca...

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

#243

Post by rokhayakebe »

moralestapia wrote: post #225
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.

>She uses Meta AI a lot. How?

Health questions or things she would usually call us for. When I was surprised to learn her friends use it.

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

#244

Post by [deleted] »

n2d4 wrote: post #78
gwbas1c wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reverse acquisition? IE, similar to how Disney "bought" Pixar, but much of Pixar's IP overshadows Disney's IP; or how Apple bought Next and the current MacOS is basically NextOS under the hood. It's a technique that companies do to avoid disruption: Buy early stage startups, and by the time they could "disrupt" the parent company, the parent company's management is ready to retire, and the former startup's management…

In what way does Pixar's IP overshadow Disney's? Listing the highest-grossing media franchises [1], Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, Star Wars, and Disney Princesses are on #2-#5 respectively, while Pixar's top spot is #16 with Cars. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media...

[deleted]

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

#245

Post by noosphr »

paxys wrote: post #237
noosphr wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driving for Uber in 2010 was amazing. There were plenty of people on HN who signed up for the app to drive people back home before and after work. Being able to see your car move in real time on the uber database with >2s lag between your car GPS and customers phone was magical in a way that's hard to describe today.

Lots of things were amazing when there was unlimited VC money flowing in and no expectation of profit. No point bringing it up 15 years later in a new reality.

Yes. But in this case it's terrible _even before the VC money runs out_.

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

#246

Post by aphexairlines »

stingraycharles wrote: post #150
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already have a chatgpt competitor, you can talk to llama in all the facebook apps, they're just clearly inferior.

Where can I talk to llama in their apps? Serious question.

Also standalone: https://www.meta.ai/ and https://about.fb.com/news/2025/04/introducing-meta-ai-app-ne...

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

#247

Post by zozbot234 »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #216
rybosome wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a smart purchase, it's just that I don't see how these datasets factor into super-intelligence. I don't think you can create a super-intelligent AI with more human data, even if it's high-quality data from paid human contributors. Unless we watered-down the definition of super-intelligent AI. To me, super-intelligence means an AI that has an intelligence that dwarfs anything theoretically possible from a human m…

I'll believe that AI is anywhere near as smart as Albert Einstein in any domain whatsoever (let alone science-heavy ones, where the tiniest details can be critical to any assessment) when it stops making stuff up with the slightest provocation. Current 'AI' is nothing more than a toy, and treating it as super smart or "super intelligent" may even be outright dangerous. I'm way more comfortable with the "stochastic parrot" framing, since we all know that parrots shouldn't always be taken seriously.

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

#248

Post by 1024core »

I haven't read the article yet (I'm about to) but I'm curious: what are Yann's views on this? He's been pretty vocal that LLMs won't lead to AGI.

Edit: read the article. No mention of Yann. What kind of journalists are these people, to not get viewpoints from different angles? They might as well just reproduce press releases and be done with it.

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

#249

Post by nova22033 »

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

Also..he can't be fired by the board.

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

#250

Post by megaman821 »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #207
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.

Meta already had an AI division led by the venerable Yann LeCun - someone with actual AI bona fides. I'm not seeing any info about what this does to LeCun's position in Meta.

He runs a more far-future R&D AI lab and someone else runs Llama, Meta AI, PyTorch, etc.
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