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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

#381

Post by gmd63 »

mooreds wrote: post #61
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?

The host on this podcast[0] had a good point about the "investment". It was really a merger, but framed as an investment to sidestep regulators. Key attributes: * CEO works for meta * almost but not quite a majority stake taken 0: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/world-bank-cuts-u-s-gr...

These types of "Aaackshually" business strategies are repulsive, and are evidence that these people who wield immense responsibility do not deserve it.

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

#382

Post by bornfreddy »

zht wrote: post #361
moralestapia wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, also the industry could come up with their own Scale if they were forced to. But probs. it just makes sense on paper, Scale's revenue will pay this for itself and what they could do is to give/keep the best training sets for Meta, for "free" now. Zuck's not an idiot. The Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions were phenomenal in hindsight.

is he not? what about the whole metaverse thing and renaming the whole company to meta?

What about it? Imagine buying Twitter and renaming it to "X".

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

#383

Post by nikcub »

Peroni wrote: post #69
Illniyar wrote: post #39

Matt Levine suggested that this was an aquihire. And the weird setup where they only buy non voting shares is to not trigger any regulatory review

$14.3 Billion seems excessive for it to be a pure aquihire play. There's undoubtedly some IP acquisition (or at least exclusive access to certain IP) involved.

It's about 0.85% of Meta's market cap - less than the 1% they paid for (granted, all of) Instagram. They also paid about 1% of market cap for Oculus ($2b into a ~$220b market cap)

Seems about par for Facebook when it comes to company-shifting acquisitions.

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

#384

Post by strict9 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #376
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.

> Llama [...] among many other open source contributions Llama is not Open Source. Don't buy Meta's marketing that's trying to dilute the term. Llama is only available under restrictive terms that favor Meta.

Fair point. I cannot amend my original comment but you are correct in that the weights have restrictions which go against the nature of Open Source software.

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

#385

Post by moralestapia »

zht wrote: post #361
moralestapia wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, also the industry could come up with their own Scale if they were forced to. But probs. it just makes sense on paper, Scale's revenue will pay this for itself and what they could do is to give/keep the best training sets for Meta, for "free" now. Zuck's not an idiot. The Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions were phenomenal in hindsight.

is he not? what about the whole metaverse thing and renaming the whole company to meta?

The metaverse will happen, IMO. The tech is just not there, yet.

Even if it turns out to be wasted money, which I doubt, he's still sitting on almost 2 trillion. Not an L on my book.

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

#387

Post by consumer451 »

moralestapia wrote: post #385
zht wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is he not? what about the whole metaverse thing and renaming the whole company to meta?

The metaverse will happen, IMO. The tech is just not there, yet. Even if it turns out to be wasted money, which I doubt, he's still sitting on almost 2 trillion. Not an L on my book.

> The metaverse will happen, IMO. The tech is just not there, yet.

This seems possible, and it just sounds so awful to me. Think about the changes to the human condition that arose from the smartphone.

People at concerts and other events scrolling phones, parents missing their children growing up while scrolling their phones. Me, "watching" a movie, scrolling my phone.

VR/AR makes all that sound like a walk in the park.

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

#388

Post by LargeWu »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #305
evanelias wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that people hate Oracle for a variety of reasons, but this is just such a ridiculous assertion. They've been one of the largest tech companies for multiple decades. Do you honestly believe that a majority of their revenue came from legal settlements from suing their own customers, at any time in their history? Do you have a citation for this claim? I mean if the company is as absurdly litigious as you're saying…

I'd guess it's something to do with Oracle's licensing policies. My understanding is they'd audit businesses who used their software and bill them an additional fee for violations. Maybe it's not strictly legal settlements but it's plausible that they made more money from these fees than from their regular fees at some point and even ongoing today. (That also lines up with jokes I've heard about them hiring more lawy…

This is it.

Maybe a few years ago at where I work, Oracle requires, as part of their licensing, the ability to scan every machine owned by the company to make sure there is no unlicensed use of any of their software. If any offending installations were found, they would charge the company the cost of the license for every machine. So, thousands of users times $thousands per license.

Even if you had a license for a Java runtime for, say, your Oracle database instance, if that was found to be used for another purpose you'd get hit. Again, for every machine in the entire company, not just the offending one.

Needless to say, there was a huge firedrill to root out any rogue installs.

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

#390

Post by the_mar »

htrp wrote: post #123

Meta is effectively getting access to all of the training data that every other frontier Lab ever requested from scale so that they can recreate it. unclear whether wang is bringing a copy of all the data that they previously labeled as part of this 49% stake.

scale does not own the data of most of it’s large customers.
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