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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

#311

Post by stale2002 »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #174
tyre wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I didn't mean to imply he started it alone. Though his co-founder Lucy Guo is almost as bizarre of a story as Wang himself. I'm curious, what were they doing before data labeling?

> Though his co-founder Lucy Guo is almost as bizarre

Well, kind of. I went to school with Lucy, and she was a completely different person back then. Sure she was among the more social of the CS majors, but the gliz and glamour and weirdness with Lucy came after she got her fame and fortune.

I suspect a similar thing happen with Wang. When you are in charge of a billion dollar business, you tend to grow into the billion dollar CEO.

> what were they doing before data labeling?

They were building an API for mechanical turks. Think "send an api call, with the words 'call up this pizza restaurant and ask if they are open'" and then this API call would cause a human to follow the instructions and physically call the restaurant, and type back a response that is sent back to your API call.

The pivot to data labelling, as money poured into self driving cars, makes some amount of sense given their previous business idea. Is almost the same type of "API for humans" idea, except much more focussed on one specific usecase.

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

#312

Post by CyberMacGyver »

egillie wrote: post #291
mliker wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI and Anthropic rely on multiple data vendors for their models so that no outside company is aware of how they train their proprietary models. Forbes reported the other day that OpenAI had been winding down their usage of Scale data: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2025/06/12/scale-a...

And scale doesn’t even have the best data among these vendors so I also don’t get this argument

What are some other options ?

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

#313

Post by eGQjxkKF6fif »

Loughla wrote: post #281
sensanaty wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean have you seen the interview he did with Theo Von? The guy is a straight up Alien in the way he talks and acts, all those memes about him being a lizard aren't exactly far off.

He was isolated from the real world starting at around age, what, 22? I'm all for calling out his random flailing in this space for what it is, but it always strikes me as strange when people are surprised that he's weird and robotic. I'm betting he never learned how to actually interact with other professional humans. He's lived in a golden tower surrounded by people who agree with him or want something from him sin…

'dumb fucks' https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/mark-zuck...

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

#314

Post by jacksnipe »

strict9 wrote: post #56
Workaccount2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the tech companies, Meta is the most ruthless and shameless. You'd have to be a total fool to trust Zuck, especially Zuck who put billions into AR for not much return and now billions into AI to create lackluster lagging models.

Off base when considering the likes of Palantir and many others. Not a fan of the person or many of Meta's business practices. But Meta has given a lot back with Llama and PyTorch, among many other open source contributions. Which others in the space are not doing.

Llama was kind of a forced hand though. Yknow, when the model was leaked?

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

#315

Post by e3bc54b2 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #273
n2d4 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Because, in the 1990s, Pixar's IP was more popular than Disney's. The story (as I remember it from a Jobs biography) was that, in the Disney parks, there were longer lines for Pixar characters than Disney characters. Someone in leadership (don't remember the name) basically swallowed pride and bought Pixar from Jobs. It was considered a "reverse acquisition" because Jobs had so much stock he technically controlled Di…

IIRC Jobs was the single largest shareholder of Disney after acquisition, so that checks out.

Found the source: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/01/6038-2/

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

#316

Post by rokobobo »

mjburgess wrote: post #303
Bjorkbat wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. If you aren't willing to give your friend $14 billion to join your company so you can hang out more, then are you two really friends?

I could see a friend giving me 4% of his net worth on those terms, esp. if i might return a few percent, in the fullness of time.

If a friend doesn’t give you 4% of their net worth, how can you be certain you are one of their 25 closest friends?

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

#317

Post by psb217 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #264
psb217 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say superintelligence is more about producing deeper insight, making more abstract links across domains, and advancing the frontiers of knowledge than about doing stuff faster. Thinking speed correlates with intelligence to some extent, but at the higher end the distinction between speed and quality becomes clear.

If anything, "abstract links across domains" is the one area where even very low intelligence AI's will still have an edge, simply because any AI trained on general text has "learned" a whole lot of random knowledge about lots of different domains; more than any human could easily acquire. But again, this is true of AI's no matter how "smart" they are. Not related to any "super intelligence" specifically. Similarly,…

I don't think current models are capable of making abstract links across domains. They can latch onto superficial similarities, but I have yet to see an instance of a model making an unexpected and useful analogy. It's a high bar, but I think that's fair for declaring superintelligence.

In general, I agree that these models are in some sense extremely knowledgeable, which suggests they are ripe for producing productive analogies if only we can figure out what they're missing compared to human-style thinking. Part of what makes it difficult to evaluate the abilities of these models is that they are wildly superhuman in some ways and quite dumb in others.

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

#318

Post by FajitaNachos »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #86
strict9 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off base when considering the likes of Palantir and many others. Not a fan of the person or many of Meta's business practices. But Meta has given a lot back with Llama and PyTorch, among many other open source contributions. Which others in the space are not doing.

React made quite a mess of the web just so we couldn't browse with JavaScript disabled, thereby allowing Facebook to track us through those like buttons that popped up everywhere. Are there hidden barbs in llama and pytorch too? I'm not close enough to them to know.

React is the defacto standard of web development for a reason. That's not the reason you can't browse the web with JS (it would be Angular if it wasn't React or others). And just because you use React, doesn't mean Meta can track you.

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

#319

Post by delusional »

rlt wrote: post #301
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.

Meta “will have a 49% stake in the artificial intelligence startup, but will not have any voting power” Wouldn’t Scale’s board/execs still have a fiduciary duty to existing shareholders, not just Meta?

Yes, but Meta would be able to kick the board and find another one more willing to accept their proposal as the best for shareholders.

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

#320

Post by Applejinx »

zozbot234 wrote: post #247
Bjorkbat wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

Earlier today in a conversation about how AI ads all look the same, I described them as 'clouds of usually' and 'a stale aftertaste of many various things that weren't special'.

If you have a cloud of usually, there may be perfectly valid things to do with it: study it, use it for low-value normal tasks, make a web page or follow a recipe. Mundane ordinary things not worth fussing over.

This is not a path to Einstein. It's more relevant to ask whether it will have deleterious effects on users to have a compliant slave at their disposal, one that is not too bright but savvy about many menial tasks. This might be bad for people to get used to, and in that light the concerns about ethical treatment of AIs are salient.

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