Cracks are forming in Meta’s partnership with Scale AI

Summary

It’s only been since June that Meta invested $14.3 billion in the data vendor Scale AI, bringing on CEO Alexandr Wang and several of the startup’s top executives to run Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). However, the relationship between the two companies is already showing signs of fraying. At least one of the executives Wang brought over to help run MSL — Scale AI’s former Senior Vice President of GenAI Product and Operations, Ruben Mayer — has departed Meta after just two months with the company, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Mayer spent roughly five years with Scale AI across two stints. In his short time at Meta, Mayer oversaw AI data operations teams and reported to Wang, but wasn’t tapped to join the company’s TBD labs — the core unit tasked with building AI superintelligence, where top AI researchers from OpenAI have landed. Mayer did not respond to two separate requests for comment from TechCrunch. Further, TBD Labs is working with third-party data vendors other than Scale AI to train its upcoming AI models, according to five people familiar with the matter. Those third-party vendors include Mercor and Surge, two of Scale AI’s largest competitors, the people said. While AI labs commonly work with several data vendors – Meta has been working with Mercor and Surge since before TBD Labs was spun up – it’s rare for an AI lab to invest so heavily in one data vendor. That makes this situation especially notable: even with Meta’s multi-billion-dollar investment, several sources said that researchers in TBD Labs see Scale AI’s data as low quality and have expressed a preference to work with Surge and Mercor. Scale AI initially built its business on a crowdsourcing model that used a large, low-cost workforce to handle simple data annotation tasks. But as AI models have grown more sophisticated, they now require highly-skilled domain experts—such as doctors, lawyers, and scientists—to generate and refine the high-quality data needed to improve ...