In a major move, technology giant Meta has not only acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI by investing $14.3 billion but has also recruited its 28-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead Meta's superintelligence unit. This marks a shift in priorities for artificial intelligence development.
This is not a regular AI top talent hiring by Meta, as Wang, who dropped out from MIT to build his own AI empire, is not known for his academic excellence but has a reputation for operational execution in his role as one of the two cofounders of Scale AI. His company made its name by mobilizing large networks of human data annotators—through platforms like Remotasks—to train machine learning systems. With this acquisition, Meta is signaling that owning the data "pipes," rather than just the model architectures, is the real power play in the AI arms race.
While Meta's competitors Google and OpenAI are focusing on refining the algorithm, Mark Zuckerberg's firm is now strategically focusing more on owning the entire AI lifecycle—from data generation to model training and product deployment. This vertical integration has parallels to the way companies such as Apple control hardware and software to create tighter feedback loops and promote faster innovation.
Meta, once a pioneer in open-source models, such as LLaMA, has faced delays in its AI roadmap and talent drain in its key teams in recent times. Bringing in Wang is interpreted as further indication that the company is moving towards a more product-oriented approach to superintelligence, like Sam Altman opted for with OpenAI. The company is betting that this approach of strategic leadership and scalable data operations will outpace the academic-style development of models.
The investment values Scale at $29 billion and comes just weeks after a previous funding round—backed by Nvidia and Amazon—that had valued the company at $14 billion. It also marks Meta's second-largest acquisition, following its $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp.
With Wang's recruitment immediately after investing in Scale AI, Meta intends to show its serious intent in the supremacy race of AI, with players like Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and China's DeepSeek leading the charge.
