Meta is making a $14.3 billion investment in artificial intelligence company Scale and recruiting its CEO Alexandr Wang to join a team developing “superintelligence” at the tech giant.
Meta announced what it called a “strategic partnership and investment” with Scale late Thursday. Scale said the $14.3 billion investment puts its market value at over $29 billion.
Scale said it will remain an independent company but the agreement will “substantially expand Scale and Meta’s commercial relationship.” Meta will hold a 49% stake in the startup.
Wang, though leaving for Meta with a small group of other Scale employees, will remain on Scale’s board of directors. Replacing him is a new interim Scale CEO Jason Droege, who was previously the company’s chief strategy officer and had past executive roles at Uber Eats and Axon.
Zuckerberg’s increasing focus on the abstract idea of “superintelligence” — which rival companies call artificial general intelligence, or AGI — is the latest pivot for a tech leader who in 2021 went all-in on the idea of the metaverse, changing the company’s name and investing billions into advancing virtual reality and related technology.
Wang was a 19-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and co-founder Lucy Guo started Scale in 2016.
They won influential backing that summer from the startup incubator Y Combinator, which was led at the time by Sam Altman, now the CEO of OpenAI. Wang dropped out of MIT, following a trajectory similar to that of Zuckerberg, who quit Harvard University to start Facebook more than a decade earlier.
What Scale offered to AI developers was a more tailored version of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which had long been a go-to service for matching freelance workers with temporary online jobs.
More recently, the growing commercialization of AI large language models — the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama — brought a new market for Scale’s annotation teams. The company claims to service “every leading large language model,” including from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft, by helping to fine tune their training data and test their performance. It’s not clear what the Meta deal will mean for Scale’s other customers.
Wang has also sought to build close relationships with the U.S. government, winning military contracts to supply AI tools to the Pentagon and attending President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The head of Trump’s science and technology office, Michael Kratsios, was an executive at Scale for the four years between Trump’s first and second terms. Meta has also begun providing AI services to the federal government.
It hasn’t yet released its purportedly most advanced model, Llama 4 Behemoth, despite previewing it in April as “one of the smartest LLMs in the world and our most powerful yet.”
“How do we build AI systems that understand the physical world, that have persistent memory, that can reason and can plan?” LeCun asked at a French tech conference last year.
These are all characteristics of intelligent behavior that large language models “basically cannot do, or they can only do them in a very superficial, approximate way,” LeCun said.
Instead, he emphasized Meta’s interest in “tracing a path towards human-level AI systems, or perhaps even superhuman.” When he returned to France’s annual VivaTech conference again on Wednesday, LeCun dodged a question about the pending Scale deal but said his AI research team’s plan has “always been to reach human intelligence and go beyond it.”
“It’s just that now we have a clearer vision for how to accomplish this,” he said.
