Meta had recently invested $14.3 billion in the acquisition of Scale AI, an artificial intelligence start-up company whose founder, Alexandr Wang, would lead the newly created studio of Meta and concentrate on the development of “super intelligence”. According to the latest report of CNBC, Scale AI has announced a reduction of 200 employees, approximately 14 per cent of its total workforce.
In an aide-mémoire sent to employees on Wednesday, the interim CEO of Scale AI, Jason Droege, stated that the expansion of the company in terms of “generated AI capacity” was “too rapid” and created too many “over-bureaucratic” levels. Jason Drog states that Scale AI remains a well-resourced and well-funded company. “These changes will make us more agile and able to respond more quickly to market changes and customer needs.” In the aide-memoire, Drog wrote. “This structure will enable us to better serve current users and win back those who cooperate with us to slow down. According to Drog, Scale AI will “severely increase the number of employees” in its application operations in the second half of this year, including branches of the corporate and international public sectors.
Scale AI was founded in 2016 and is well known for collating data for training cutting-edge AI models with large technology companies such as Open AI, Google and Microsoft. According to Reuters, Open AI has phased out its cooperation with Scale AI over the past year, and Google is said to have cut it off after Scale AI entered into a deal with Meta. Before the reduction, Scale AI had 1,400 global staff. The spokesperson, Joe Osborne, said that the affected staff members had been paid severance pay. He also indicated that the company would also terminate its cooperation with 500 of the thousands of contractors worldwide.
In a statement to CNBC, Osborne states: “We are streamlining data operations to speed up action and provide better data solutions for our generating AI clients. We also plan to undertake major investments and recruitment in the business and government AI fields.” Meta has been running a multi-billion-dollar AI recruitment boom to better compete with rivals such as Open AI. The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has selected Alexandre Wang as the company’s chief artificial intelligence officer, overseeing his new “Meta Supersmart Laboratory”. A few Scale AI employees will join the company.
Alexandre Wang, under the leadership of the Meta Super Intelligence Laboratory, is likely to accelerate the development of a GPT-4o model competing with OpenAI. The competition for artificial intelligence has highlighted the high risk of artificial intelligence development, and Scale ‘ s reorganization may force competitors to look for other data providers, thereby affecting the training of artificial intelligence models.