[HN Gopher] Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superi...
___________________________________________________________________
Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab
Author : RyanShook
Score : 370 points
Date : 2025-06-13 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| sleepyguy wrote:
| Meta bought Scale for 14.3 Billion. This is the the new way
| Google, MS, Meta buy other companies and avoid any scrutiny. They
| invest huge amounts of cash and then the CEO comes to work for
| them. Anti Trust law is circumvent while the big companies gobble
| up any competition.
| leumassuehtam wrote:
| I hope this time they can come up with a model at least or par
| with open source offerings.
| tough wrote:
| hey or at least not try to fake the benchmarks to fool us...
| TheEdonian wrote:
| These numbers are absurd
| Verdex wrote:
| Yeah, half of my AI skepticism isn't that the tools don't work.
| It's that I'm having a tough time figuring out how these things
| are ever going to produce ROI.
|
| Like, at some point the end product needs to be a literal
| genie's lamp or fountain of youth.
| cess11 wrote:
| Scale AI has deep cooperation with military agencies and a
| fresh large contract with the Gulf state with the largest US
| military presence. It's likely they're building a new
| generation of combat command systems and the like,
| consolidation of surveillance and management tooling in the
| ongoing and future US wars isn't surprising.
| Verdex wrote:
| [Okay so the third option that I thought of but decided not
| to put down was: literal genie's lamp, fountain of youth,
| or robot army. Because then who cares if you collapse the
| economy if AGI, you'll be safe with your robot army. Not
| particularly happy that this option is potentially not far
| from the mark.]
| b0a04gl wrote:
| that's the trap though. assuming roi has to show up as
| product. the real return is upstream. market positioning.
| narrative control. gatekeeping the stack. the genie's lamp
| isn't the deliverable. it's the excuse to reorganize power
| under the hood while everyone chases the magic trick
| radicalbyte wrote:
| He spent $45B on Metaverse.
| Marazan wrote:
| Which is the future and we all use on a day-to-day basis
| these days.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Yeah I don't know how we all managed to survive before we
| were wearing clunky headsets to play our role as captive
| audience to advertisers :-)
| ta12653421 wrote:
| You are wrong!!! You just dont get it!!! :-D
| sethops1 wrote:
| $45 billion _so far_!
| paxys wrote:
| And counting
| rchaud wrote:
| They have reported _losing_ $60 billion in Reality Labs since
| 2020:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-q1-2025-earnings-
| realit...
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| These people believe they're on track to create life and
| displace the majority of labor in the world. Nothing else makes
| the level of investment make sense. It's a prisoner's dilemma
| where they all think they need to try because regardless of the
| likelihood of success, the expected value remains astronomical
| and the risk of not being the winner is extinction.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| If "absurd" implies "too high": I always thought strong
| reactions to valuations a bit strange. Businesses are
| complicated and assuming that somebody who is willing to spend
| billions of dollars thought a bit harder about the value than
| what I can provide with my gut reaction seems reasonable.
|
| So I started to treat it as more of an update, as in "Huh, my
| idea of what something is worth just _really_ clashed with the
| market, curious. "
|
| Does not mean the market is right, of course. But most of the
| time, when digging into it and thinking a bit more about it, I
| would not be willing to take the short position and as a
| consequence moderate my reaction.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| yeah they are. but the numbers aren't the product. they're the
| filter. you throw 14b at the space not to get ROI but to set
| the bar so high no one else can enter without bending the knee.
| absurd is the point.
| seydor wrote:
| new ai avatars for your metaverse glasses . stock will surely be
| up
| bix6 wrote:
| 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?
| indy wrote:
| Would buying 49% prevent any government investigations into the
| deal?
| bix6 wrote:
| Yeah 50% may have triggered antitrust
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| It does seem likely that the deal was at least partially
| structured to avoid antitrust scrutiny but my impression is
| that under the DMA/DSA (I can never keep track of which is
| which) in Europe Meta is technically a gatekeeper and has
| different obligations so I'll be curious to see what
| happens there
| paganel wrote:
| If this is marketed as a strategic acquisition for the
| national interest of the US tech industry in order to
| counter-act the Chinese trying to catch up on AI then nothing
| of the sorts will happen.
| rodonn wrote:
| It might reduce scrutiny, but not completely prevent it.
| Clayton act says "No person engaged in commerce or in any
| activity affecting commerce shall _acquire, directly or
| indirectly, the whole or any part of the stock or other share
| capital_ and no person subject to the jurisdiction of the
| Federal Trade Commission shall acquire the whole or any part
| of the assets of another person engaged also in commerce or
| in any activity affecting commerce, where in any line of
| commerce or in any activity affecting commerce in any section
| of the country, the effect of such acquisition may be
| substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a
| monopoly. "
| lucaslazarus wrote:
| Strikes me more as an attempt to maintain plausible deniability
| if/when the FTC comes knocking
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| The FTC will do nothing. Not under Trump.
| Bnjoroge wrote:
| he's right. Trump is only marginally more M&A-friendly than
| Biden.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Trump is pretty anti-other social media.
|
| All the big anti-trust against Meta/Google started under
| Trump (despite what Zuck claimed to Joe Rogan).
| lucaslazarus wrote:
| Perhaps, but it's worth hedging against a potential Trump-
| Zuck fallout. Also, the statute of limitations for
| commencing an antitrust investigation is 4 years (15 U.S.C.
| SS 15b).
| JoshTko wrote:
| Competitors just need to lobby sufficiently to get action
| __loam wrote:
| There is literally an active anti-trust case against Meta
| right now.
| bix6 wrote:
| Size seems large enough to warrant an FTC look, especially
| given Meta's past. But I guess 1% less lets you pass GO :)
| Peroni wrote:
| Yep. They were quite blatant about it in the article:
|
| >The structure was intentional. Executives at Meta and Scale
| AI were worried about drawing the attention of regulators.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Of all the tech companies, Meta is the most ruthless and
| shameless. You'd have to be a total fool to trust Zuck,
| especially Zuck who put billions into AR for not much return
| and now billions into AI to create lackluster lagging models.
| tomrod wrote:
| I'd trust Zuck if I had a signed, airtight agreement for a
| large amount of money he paid into an escrow account for
| something I owned or was transferring ownership.
|
| He's very close to peak homo economicus. (EDIT: this next
| point is wrong, the oral history I heard referred to
| Winklevoss pops, not Zuckerberg, and I misremembered) Which
| makes sense, given his father is deep in actuarial services.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| "If I were rich, I'd trust other rich people"
| tomrod wrote:
| Not what I said. I said if legal machinery were in place,
| I'd be willing.
|
| I would not trust someone simply because we both have
| significant personal assets.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Zuckerberg's dad is/was a dentist. Not that the claim makes
| any sense even if he were an actuary.
| tomrod wrote:
| Oh man, talk about getting my wires crossed. The
| Winklevoss' twins dad is the actuary!
| efficax wrote:
| trust what? gimme that 14 billion and i don't care what you
| do
| strict9 wrote:
| 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.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Just because you give a lot does not mean you don't take a
| lot.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| React made quite a mess of the web just so we couldn't
| browse with JavaScript disabled, thereby allowing Facebook
| to track us through those like buttons that popped up
| everywhere.
|
| Are there hidden barbs in llama and pytorch too? I'm not
| close enough to them to know.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| It was probably inevitable even without React. Easier to
| serve the same JSON to my web application and
| iPhone/android apps, Teams bot, etc.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Not a fan of Facebook or React (though React Native is
| IMHO the one eyed among the blind for cross platform
| mobile development), but I think that's a bit far
| fetched. I do think Facebook has (or had?) genuinely an
| engineering culture that wants to give something back.
| strict9 wrote:
| This is true. I've been to several conferences where FB
| sent engineers to talk about their open source projects
| or how they used a particular language or framework.
|
| I remember the conflicted feeling of strongly disliking
| their products and leadership but liking their
| contributions. Same energy but more intense in both
| directions many years later.
| FajitaNachos wrote:
| React is the defacto standard of web development for a
| reason. That's not the reason you can't browse the web
| with JS (it would be Angular if it wasn't React or
| others). And just because you use React, doesn't mean
| Meta can track you.
| mimischi wrote:
| Their point was that (i) React becoming the defacto
| standard played into the hands of Meta, who are
| interested in tracking people. (ii) Tracking is made
| easier by running arbitrary JavaScript in the browser.
| And (iii) before SPAs were big (pre-React), more people
| used to completely disable JS in their browser.
|
| Not saying I buy this theory. Just trying to explain what
| I think they were alluding to, as I had the impression
| you missed it and went in a different direction.
| jajko wrote:
| 2 different topics, who you are (as a person, or company or
| other group of people) isn't some scale where you add + and
| - and judge final number.
|
| Bad/evil deeds define us 1000x more than positive ones and
| thats our lasting legacy and how we are/will be judged.
| strict9 wrote:
| I agree with all of that.
|
| The point was to counter the statement that Meta is the
| most ruthless and shameless of all companies.
|
| The most ruthless and shameless company would not give
| back a lot of useful free open source software for
| hobbyists and companies to use.
| bix6 wrote:
| Yes they would? Mega corps can afford to commoditize
| various layers which prevents competition from accessing
| any profit. Meanwhile Meta et al can capture that profit
| in their own layers instead.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| First, the only model creators ones who have not "given
| back" in the way you mean, are OpenAI and Anthropic,
| everyone else has at least some models in the open.
|
| Second, I would argue that it's strange how we are
| discounting the contribution of OpenAI and Anthropic,
| because being the first to show that something valuable is
| possible actually counts for quite a lot in my book.
| Competition and open-source copies are nice, but the value
| add attribution in ai labs feels really strange at times.
|
| What Meta has given, so far, are decent copies, which
| mostly serve their own needs and are making it harder for
| the above companies (who actually have to generate revenue
| through AI efforts, because it's all they do) to exist. And
| that's fine and all, Meta can do what they want to the
| degree the law permits, but I have a hard time
| understanding them as the good guys in the AI space, unless
| I squint _very_ heavily.
| jacksnipe wrote:
| Llama was kind of a forced hand though. Yknow, when the
| model was leaked?
| jonas21 wrote:
| Maybe for the original, now obsolete, version. But nobody
| forced them to release Llama 2, 3, and 4.
| __loam wrote:
| I don't think it's a big stretch to say that Meta has not
| only been more successful than Palantir at mass
| surveillance, but has also likely caused a greater
| magnitude of harm (a lot through negligence) when
| considering events like the genocide in Myanmar.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Also even before that, FAIR had quite the reputation as a
| great ML lab, especially in NLP.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > 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.
| strict9 wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| > Of all the tech companies, Meta is the most ruthless and
| shameless.
|
| Have you seen Oracle?
| LargeWu wrote:
| Not sure if this is true any more, but they used to make a
| majority of their revenue by suing their own customers.
| evanelias wrote:
| 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, it
| stands to reason that you wouldn't make unsubstantiated
| claims about them in a public forum, right?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| 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 lawyers than software developers
| given someone's gotta do the audits.)
| evanelias wrote:
| No, I do not believe it is even remotely plausible that
| they have ever made a majority of their revenue from
| licensing violation fees, _especially_ today, when their
| total annual revenue is over $57 billion.
|
| Oracle is an enormous company. I'm in my 40s, and
| literally every non-startup I've worked for in my career
| has been an Oracle customer, across multiple product
| lines. They're a 48-year-old company with more than
| 150,000 employees.
|
| To be absolutely clear, I'm not expressing an opinion
| here on Oracle or its licensing and auditing practices.
| I'm just responding to the wild claims about revenue from
| lawsuits or license violations. Oracle stock has been
| publicly-traded for nearly four decades, so there's
| plenty of data available from their earnings statements.
| If these claims were even remotely based in reality, it
| would be easy to cite a source.
| LargeWu wrote:
| This is it.
|
| Maybe a few years ago at <$megacorp> 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.
| evanelias wrote:
| OK, but that anecdote is orthogonal to your original
| claim. No mention of a lawsuit or actually having to pay
| extra fees. And "rogue installs" essentially means "using
| copyrighted software in a quantity that exceeds what we
| actually paid for", i.e. theft.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > especially Zuck who put billions into AR for not much
| return
|
| While, it's indisputable about the current state of AR/VR.
| Zuck has a large exetensial risk to Microsoft/Apple/Google.
| If those companies want to revoke access to Meta's apps (ex
| [1]) they can and Zuck is in trouble. At one point Google was
| trying to compete with FaceBook with Google+ and while that
| didn't work, it's still a large business risk.
|
| Putting billions into trying to get a moat for your product
| seems like prudent business sense when you're raking in
| hundreds of billions.
|
| [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/01/facebook-google-
| scandal/
| patapong wrote:
| > create lackluster lagging models
|
| But also for a long time the best available open-weights
| models on the market - this investment has done a lot to
| kickstart open AI research, which I am grateful for no matter
| the reasons.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| That's the MO for all these big players. They don't shell out
| merely for the marketplace advantage, there's always some meta
| (no pun intended) Gordon Gecko corpo warfare schtick going on
| in the background.
|
| To quote Peter Thiel, "competition is for losers".
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Reverse acquisition? IE, similar to how Disney "bought" Pixar,
| but much of Pixar's IP overshadows Disney's IP; or how Apple
| bought Next and the current MacOS is basically NextOS under the
| hood.
|
| It's a technique that companies do to avoid disruption: Buy
| early stage startups, and by the time they could "disrupt" the
| parent company, the parent company's management is ready to
| retire, and the former startup's management is ready to take
| their place.
| oidar wrote:
| NeXTSTEP not NextOS
| detourdog wrote:
| If one is really after accuracy NeXT wasn't a start-up at
| the time of acquisition.
| n2d4 wrote:
| In what way does Pixar's IP overshadow Disney's? Listing the
| highest-grossing media franchises [1], Mickey Mouse, Winnie
| the Pooh, Star Wars, and Disney Princesses are on #2-#5
| respectively, while Pixar's top spot is #16 with Cars.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-
| grossing_media...
| CSMastermind wrote:
| My understanding is that the talent at Pixar completely
| took over the leadership of Disney's animation studios.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Because, in the 1990s, Pixar's IP was more popular than
| Disney's. The story (as I remember it from a Jobs
| biography) was that, in the Disney parks, there were longer
| lines for Pixar characters than Disney characters.
|
| Someone in leadership (don't remember the name) basically
| swallowed pride and bought Pixar from Jobs. It was
| considered a "reverse acquisition" because Jobs had so much
| stock he technically controlled Disney afterwards.
| n2d4 wrote:
| This was certainly true for animated movies in the 2000s
| (where Pixar clearly dominated), although not the
| companies as a whole. Pixar shareholders (including Jobs)
| owned about 15% after the deal.
|
| This isn't a reverse acquisition, it's just a normal
| acquisition. Company A (Disney) has many things but is
| missing one thing (an animation team that doesn't suck),
| so they buy a company that does have that thing.
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| IIRC Jobs was the single largest shareholder of Disney
| after acquisition, so that checks out.
|
| Found the source:
| https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/01/6038-2/
| mooreds wrote:
| 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...
| ZiiS wrote:
| The stake of FB and people now employed at FB at the
| executive level is clearly over 50% it seems very odd they
| are convincing anyone this is a minority?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > people now employed at FB at the executive level
|
| I think it's reasonable that this is not counted, unless
| there's some possible condition on the stock ownership that
| I'm not aware of. If they ultimately disagree with the
| decisions from Facebook then they can, in theory, get help
| from the other stakeholders to override them.
|
| That said, I would not be the least bit surprised if this
| turned out to be some scheme in which they use a series of
| technicalities that make the deal look like a merger but
| "be" an investment.
| gmd63 wrote:
| These types of "Aaackshually" business strategies are
| repulsive, and are evidence that these people who wield
| immense responsibility do not deserve it.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| not weird at all if you assume the goal was never to integrate
| but to neutralize. 49 percent gives them just enough leverage
| to shape roadmap, slow-roll access, nudge governance. the
| public terms are clean because the real effects show up over
| time. it's a slow freeze.
| gregorvand wrote:
| Gets around anti competition issues. It's not an acquisition,
| it's just a...
| whitej125 wrote:
| Likely to steer clear of regulatory scrutiny or approval
| processes (specifically FTC and DOJ).
| mliker wrote:
| It doesn't really affect the other frontier labs too much
| because OpenAI and Anthropic rely on multiple data vendors for
| their models so that no outside company is aware of how they
| train their proprietary models. Forbes reported the other day
| that OpenAI had been winding down their usage of Scale data:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2025/06/12/scale-a...
| vessenes wrote:
| Largest acquihire ever, beating out oculus/carmack, also done by
| Zuck. Meta is not afraid to build when competing, so I propose
| this is interesting.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I agree. Slightly amused at the running from one side of the
| boat to the other. So we're done with the Metaverse now?
|
| (Or maybe the metaverse needs AI bots running around ...
| perhaps scalping tickets or something. In fact I get it though
| -- they're looking for the Next Big Thing -- as all big
| companies are. I even think they're on to it this time. The
| whole metaverse thing was just so obviously misguided, misspent
| capital.)
| willsmith72 wrote:
| Did they just buy a "head of AI" for 14b?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Or did they buy the well that all their competitors drink out
| off?
| Aperocky wrote:
| I have a hard time believing that the soa labs are drinking
| from that well.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| And didn't they already have a "head of AI" who had actual bona
| fides? (LeCun)
| sgarland wrote:
| > "...opportunities of this magnitude often come at a cost," Wang
| wrote in the memo that he shared on X. "In this instance, that
| cost is my departure."
|
| Gavin Belson would be proud. Or at least steal the quote; same
| thing, really.
| jansan wrote:
| I can clearly see a connection between Gavin Belson and Wang
| dang wrote:
| No personal attacks, please.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.md/vuq7u
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| Below article has interesting info but it's paywalled. Does
| anyone have a way to read this?
|
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/fame-feud-and-fortun...
|
| Edit (as per wikipedia):
|
| "Lucy Guo was fired two years later in 2018." She was a co-
| founder.
| tomhow wrote:
| The Information's paywall seems pretty impervious these days.
| Jonovono wrote:
| And now she runs Onlyfans for minors....
| qoez wrote:
| OpenAI uses scale via eg data made by humans through outlier.
| Part of this move could probably be seen as starving competition
| from data as much as buying talent at scale.
| neom wrote:
| I was looking for side angles also. Thinking the size of the
| deal gives substantial information rights, so there is likely
| good visibility into competitors surface areas.
| ml-anon wrote:
| Every frontier lab has moved (or is moving) away from scale to
| other vendors/platforms/bespoke solutions.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| How do you know this?
| laborcontract wrote:
| One can only guess but if they were so subscribed with
| their existing clients why have they started focusing on
| much on government contracts?
| ej88 wrote:
| contracts are higher margin and give consistent ARR
| compared to data labelling
| meroes wrote:
| Doesn't scale contract out/aggregate many smaller companies,
| and that's where the bespoke solutions are?
| dbmikus wrote:
| What vendors or platforms are frontier labs moving to?
| az226 wrote:
| Mercor
| makestuff wrote:
| Will Employees be able to gain any liquidity from their options,
| or is this technically another round with no tender offer?
| sctb wrote:
| From Wang's note to employees
| (https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/1933328165306577316):
|
| > Today's investment also allows us to give back in recognition
| of your hard work and dedication to Scale over the past several
| years. The proceeds from Meta's investment will be distributed
| to those of you who are shareholders and vested equity holders,
| while maintaining the opportunity to continue participating in
| our future growth as ongoing equity holders. The exceptional
| team here has been the key to our success, so l'm thrilled to
| be able to return the favor with this meaningful liquidity
| distribution.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| From my perspective, Meta is doing pretty reasonable with their
| AI compared to eg Apple.
|
| What is their end goal with AI? I understand Google, Anthropic
| and OpenAI try to cater to a certain audience with their AI
| products.
|
| I understand the way Apple wants (but is failing) to integrate AI
| into their products.
|
| What's Meta's strategy here? What's their vision?
| tomrod wrote:
| Robotics and world-interaction, if LeCunn is to be taken as the
| primary proselyter.
| api wrote:
| When a company reaches a certain size they basically become a
| bank. Meta owns a bunch of social media properties and the
| long term prognosis for that industry is not great. It would
| make sense to get into other areas if they can do it.
| kypro wrote:
| I don't know how much adoption they've seen in the real world,
| but they have some really cool models outside of gen-ai.
|
| Stuff like:
|
| - https://segment-anything.com/
|
| - https://dinov2.metademolab.com/
| notfried wrote:
| I don't really think Meta ever had a vision beyond "Facebook is
| a social network to connect people". Since then, their strategy
| has primarily been driven by their fear of being left behind,
| or of losing the next platform war. Instagram, Whatsapp,
| Threads, VR, AR, and now AI, they all weren't driven by a
| vision as much as it was their fear of someone else opening a
| door to a new market that renders them obsolete. They are good
| at executing and capturing the first wins, but not at
| innovating, redefining a market, or pushing the frontier
| forward; which is why they eventually get stuck, lose
| direction, and fall behind (Tiktok, Apple Vision Pro, AI).
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Yes, but they've definitely made a big contribution to AI /
| LLMs. I just don't understand how they plan on monetizing
| upon things, apart from "better AI integration inside their
| own products".
|
| Are they planning to launch a ChatGPT competitor?
|
| It seems like this acquisition is focused on technology, but
| what's the product vision?
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| They already have a chatgpt competitor, you can talk to
| llama in all the facebook apps, they're just clearly
| inferior.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Where can I talk to llama in their apps? Serious
| question.
| johnecheck wrote:
| I use Messenger but not Facebook. There's a big "Ask Meta
| AI or Search" bar at the top of the app's main page.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Whatsapp you can tag @meta ai in any chat, have a
| separate chat with meta ai, forward messages to the meta
| ai chat for fact checks, etc.
| aphexairlines wrote:
| Also standalone: https://www.meta.ai/ and
| https://about.fb.com/news/2025/04/introducing-meta-ai-
| app-ne...
| jbc1 wrote:
| Their already existing chat app is what "ai" means to my
| normie friends.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| love slaves to quell the Bell Riots enough to prevent Star
| Trek?
| carefulfungi wrote:
| They sell ads. Their strategy is to use AI to take over more of
| the marketing process. They want to move spend from in-house
| marketing (creative, strategy, analytics) to Meta.
| blitzar wrote:
| > What's Meta's strategy here? What's their vision?
|
| The metaverse was their strategy. Then AI hype took over
| Silicon Valley and the unloved under-resourced AI team at
| Facebook became the stars of the show. Meta are now standing on
| the shoulders of those teams and the good will they generated
| from their foundational and open research efforts.
|
| An AI first strategy from Facebook would not have involved a
| rebrand or open sourcing any research or models and would
| probably have looked a lot like OpenAi or Grok.
| dagmx wrote:
| Their end goal isn't with AI per se.
|
| Mark wants to own platforms. He always has. That's why they
| tried to make a phone, networks, VR headsets, horizon worlds
| and now glasses.
|
| AI is just their vessel to draw people in. It's the flash that
| gets people on board. It's the commoditizing your complement,
| in that they want to undercut the competition and have the
| money to do so, as a means to pull people in rather than lose
| them to OpenAI or the like who are also trying to build
| platforms.
|
| Put another way: these companies want to be the next iOS or
| Android, and they are doing what they can to be as sticky and
| appealing as possible to make that happen.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| meta's not trying to win on assistant UX or consumer wow
| factor. their AI strategy is defensive infrastructure. they're
| building open weights, subsidising inference, investing in
| supply chain choke points like scale not to monetise directly,
| but to force the market to move on their terms. the vision
| isn't a product. it's insulation. if AGI goes closed and
| centralizsed, meta's out. so they're betting on keeping the
| floor open long enough to stay in the game. everything else is
| noise.
| wan23 wrote:
| Meta monetizes content. AI makes it easier and cheaper to
| create content. If everyone has access to high quality AI, high
| quality content may be more plentiful and that content can be
| posted on Meta's platforms, which would make it more money.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| Meta is a huge nation-state of a company, like Apple or Google,
| but its actual sources of income are arguably precarious: in
| the past decades new social media platforms have crept up and
| become really popular pretty frequently. Ai and Vr are mostly
| ways to find new sources of income: Meta has the means to
| outinvest smaller companies like Anthropic, but not the
| obligation to fit it into an existing product, like Apple.
| username223 wrote:
| > What's Meta's strategy here? What's their vision?
|
| I don't get it, either. Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp are ways to
| communicate with people you know, and they have a monopoly on
| that. (Well, Instagram is also softcore porn and product
| placement...)
|
| TikTok beat them as mindless entertainment, showing people
| videos they're likely to watch until they end, and Zuck freaked
| out. Sometimes people would rather just watch TV than hang out
| with their friends! OMG! TikTok's bottleneck is that humans
| have to create the videos, so if Zuck can generate videos to
| maximize watch time, he wins.
|
| Paying billions of dollars for a data-labeling company,
| though... Well, I guess it's not easy to put together a bunch
| of digital sweatshops in Kenya and the Philippines, but is it
| worth that much?
| christkv wrote:
| Meta just opened up an opportunity for number two in this space
| to grow even if it's only to hedge against Meta.
| Illniyar wrote:
| 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
| Peroni wrote:
| $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.
| tgv wrote:
| I know "excessive" is technically correct, but at the same
| time it seems an understatement.
| owebmaster wrote:
| Their fantasy money from ScaleAI's inflated valuation will
| easily balance this out on the books.
| nikcub wrote:
| 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.
| az226 wrote:
| Little known secret is they paid $2.7B, not $2B. And Zuck
| and the FB head of M&A were talking shit about John
| Carmack's crazy wife, who was doing his negotiation for
| him. On WhatsApp on less.
| diggan wrote:
| > the weird setup where they only buy non voting shares is to
| not trigger any regulatory review
|
| Do regulators actually fall for these sort of things in the US?
| One would expect companies to be judged based on following the
| spirit of the law, rather than nitpicking and allowing wide
| holes like this.
| Loughla wrote:
| >One would expect companies to be judged based on following
| the spirit of the law, rather than nitpicking and allowing
| wide holes like this.
|
| The letter of the law is what people follow. The spirit, or
| intent, of the law is what they argue about in court cases.
|
| If the regulation says 49% and a company follows it, who's to
| say they're exploiting a loophole? They're literally
| following the law. Until there is a court case and precedent
| is set.
| diggan wrote:
| > who's to say they're exploiting a loophole?
|
| I guess "intent" is what matters really. If the intent is
| to avoid regulatory review and you could prove that intent,
| then they're trying to exploit it. That in itself should
| probably trigger a review regardless. If they've arrived at
| 49% for some other reason(s) than just to avoid regulatory
| review, then fair enough.
| Loughla wrote:
| Correct. That's what courts are for, like I said.
| rodonn wrote:
| The Clayton act explicitly includes partial acquisition as
| still being covered. "No person engaged in commerce or in
| any activity affecting commerce shall acquire, directly or
| indirectly, the whole or any part of the stock... [where]
| the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to
| lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly."
|
| There may be some other regulations that are avoided by a
| partial acquisition, but it doesn't bring it wholly outside
| of the relevant antitrust laws.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Word on the street is scale.ai knows which data sets/data
| approaches anthropic and openai used to do their RL reasoning
| training. Meta is paying for that know how/information.
| pu_pe wrote:
| People are saying this is an acquihire, and the article states
| that Scale AI's CEO will join Meta in a "top leadership role" in
| their new Superintelligence lab. Does this mean Lecun is stepping
| down?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Superintelligence, really? I'm really looking forward to their
| "super intelligent" stochastic parrots -- or stochastic llamas,
| as the case may be. The only thing "super" here is the
| ludicrous hype. It's totally out of control.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| This is a new organization, Lecun leads the FAIR team which is
| more focused on basic ML research than this ASI focused team.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Is Wikipedia is correct, Scale AI does not work on AGI at all,
| but has clearly pivoted to surveillance and military applications
| like so many others:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_AI
|
| A drone army would come in handy for suppressing dissent in the
| Gulf monarchies or in LA.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Incorrect, they work with military as well as AI labs like
| OpenAI.
| paxys wrote:
| Spending $15B to hire a 28 year old to build you some AI is
| certainly a move. You can call Zuck many things, but "afraid to
| take risks" isn't one of them.
| akudha wrote:
| What is the big risk here? He has the cash to burn and he has
| full control of his position. Nothing will happen to him if he
| wastes a few Billions. He is not some poor single mom who has
| to decide between fixing her car and paying for kid's Christmas
| presents
| paxys wrote:
| Spending $15B is a risk. Yes they have the money, but we're
| talking a quarter of Meta's annual income. That's not
| nothing.
|
| And money concerns aside, Meta _needs_ to be a major player
| in AI. If they have made the wrong bet with Scale AI & Wang
| then the company will suffer in the long term.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| It's surely mostly a stock deal though, right?
|
| So they won't take the same hit to free cash flow that they
| might otherwise do.
|
| Still a lot of money and I'm not sure it's worth it. Might
| be more like Whatsapp than Instagram, tbh.
| paxys wrote:
| It's a funding round. Scale doesn't need Meta stock, they
| need cash to burn.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Meta is doing $10 billion in buybacks a quarter. Cash vs
| stock deal doesnt make a difference I think
| coliveira wrote:
| You're thinking in the wrong scale. Meta is a $1.7T
| company, for them a $15B investment is less than 1% of the
| company. In the span of a year, this is negligible money.
| nroets wrote:
| If Scale never creates value, he will lose billions of his
| own money due to his indirect holding in Meta.
| mlinhares wrote:
| I don't think people understand that once you're a
| billionaire with full ownership of your business and no
| risk of being ousted, making or losing billions is
| irrelevant.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Billionaires don't stop caring about looking like
| dumbasses just because they're extremely wealthy.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| If this is true, then evidence indicates that I have a
| different definition of what "looking like a dumbass"
| means than many of our billionaires.
| RankingMember wrote:
| In light of these (accurate) critiques, I think I
| should've gone with my original wording, which referred
| to them still caring about their legacy regardless of how
| many billions they had. That's more what I was going for,
| but I dumbed it down, apparently too much.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Maybe, but it doesn't seem to stop them from actually
| looking like dumbasses. But that wealth attracts fans who
| constantly proclaim that their latest idea is brilliant.
|
| Maybe we should pity the poor billionaires, hopped up on
| T or ketamine and trapped in an echo chamber...but I'll
| think they'll be ok.
| RankingMember wrote:
| In the case of Musk, I almost suspect he has some kind of
| humiliation fetish.
| coliveira wrote:
| If they cared about how they looked, they wouldn't be
| doing what they do.
| komali2 wrote:
| I genuinely struggle to understand how that will affect him
| in any way. Not even any meaningful way, I mean, how could
| that possible change anything about his life, in any way?
| coliveira wrote:
| So what, do you think Mark really worries about losing a
| few billions in his company?
| laborcontract wrote:
| The risk here is that you've now put a person with no track
| record of success outside of being good at sales in charge of
| your AI efforts. You're betting that he's going to be the one
| to attract talent.
|
| The right leadership might be able to get talent to work for
| a discount. The wrong one would lead to talent not coming at
| all.
| imiric wrote:
| If Meta is known for anything besides user privacy
| violations it's for taking risks that often pay off. They
| were laughed at for overpaying for Instagram and Whatsapp,
| yet both were instrumental to their current success. Their
| continued bet on VR is still highly criticized, yet they
| were the first Big Tech company in the space, they're the
| current market leaders, and I'm sure it will have huge ROI
| in the near future. So is this bet on Wang, as ludicrous as
| it may seem now.
| laborcontract wrote:
| I've been all for it, look at my comment elsewhere in
| this thread. For me this is a huge mistake of a
| transaction that's neither accretive financially nor
| talent-wise.
|
| This isn't the Instagram or Whatsapp transaction. Scale's
| been exclusively in the data labeling space.
|
| Let's put this into perspective. OpenAI bought Jony Ive
| for about $5bln. Meta spent 3x that on Wang.
| imiric wrote:
| I'm not familiar with Scale, but data labeling can make
| or break a ML model. So if Scale is good at this, the
| $14B investment will pay itself off in no time.
| laborcontract wrote:
| There was quite loud reporting earlier this (or last?)
| year that Scale's data was so poor that it led to a great
| deal of setbacks, scrambling, and friction between the
| two companies. That reporting was at the top of my mind
| when I read this news, so I was even more baffled.
|
| Imagine being the people at Meta who've had to deal with
| Scale now seeing Mark buy Scale's CEO for $14bln.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| What is convincing you that VR will have huge ROI in the
| near future? We are over 10 years in to the modern VR era
| and despite even Meta's strong device sales it's still
| very niche. Apple is trying their hardest and even they
| had to correct their sales expectations.
| const_cast wrote:
| I think everyone is greatly overestimating VR.
|
| The thing is, I can imagine some futuristic version of AI
| that transforms humanity. But with VR, even in my wildest
| dreams with all the problems solved, it's still just
| second best to smartphones and computers.
|
| Imagine the perfect headset. Tiny, battery lasts forever,
| photo-realistic. I would still rather browse the Internet
| on my phone. I'd rather do my work on my laptop. I'd
| rather watch movies on my TV. What is the VR adding?
| Nothing but extra hoops to just through to get things
| done.
|
| The only usecase that makes any sense is gaming. But only
| some games. It's just too niche.
| imiric wrote:
| > What is the VR adding? Nothing but extra hoops to just
| through to get things done.
|
| It gives you maximum immersion into a digital world.
| Rather than view it through a rectangular 2D window, it
| can encompass 360 degrees of your vision in full 3D. If
| you don't see how this would be appealing for consuming
| content, work, entertainment, etc., then I can't convince
| you otherwise.
|
| VR adoption has always been held back by what is
| technically possible and how expensive it is. Nobody
| other than tech enthusiasts wants to wear a bulky headset
| for extended periods of time. Once we're able to produce
| that perfect headset that you mention, so that it's
| portable and comfortable like a pair of sunglasses, at an
| affordable price, the floodgates will open, and demand
| will skyrocket.
|
| The same already happened with mobile phones, several
| times. The cellular phone was invented in the early
| 1980s. It was heavy, bulky, and expensive, and only
| business people and enthusiasts used them. It wasn't
| until the mid-to-late 90s that they got cheap and
| comfortable for the general public. Then the modern
| smartphone had several precursors that were also clunky
| and expensive. It wasn't until the iPhone and Android
| devices that the technology became useful and accessible
| to everyone. There's no reason to think that the current
| iteration is the ultimate design of a personal computer.
|
| The same story is repeated for any new technology. VR
| itself has seen multiple resurgences in the last few
| decades. We're only now reaching a state where the vision
| is technically possible. There are several products on
| the market that come close. VR headsets are getting
| smaller, cheaper, and more comfortable, and AR glasses
| are getting cheaper and more powerful. I reckon we're a
| few generations away from someone launching a truly
| groundbreaking product. Thinking that all this momentum
| is just a risky bet on a niche platform would be a
| mistake.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Didn't people say the same thing about 3D TV?
| Exoristos wrote:
| "It gives you maximum immersion into a digital world."
| But then you failed to explain why anyone should care.
| const_cast wrote:
| > If you don't see how this would be appealing for
| consuming content, work, entertainment, etc., then I
| can't convince you otherwise.
|
| I don't, legitimately I don't.
|
| Okay, maximum immersion. And how does that help?
|
| Like even just on the surface having a 360 degree view
| doesn't do anything. Because my eyes are on the front of
| my head, so I'm going to be looking forward. Stuff behind
| me doesn't matter much.
|
| Same thing with 3D. Okay... but paper is two-dimensional,
| you know what I mean? Something being 3D by itself
| doesn't mean it's better or contains more information or
| is easier to use. I'd rather read and write on a two-
| dimensional surface. Reading and writing is the core of a
| lot of stuff, so there's goes that.
|
| The test for me really is imagining some usecase and then
| imagining how it would be on super advanced VR. If you
| try that, you'll find that 90% of usecases just fail
| compared to already existing technology. Like imagine
| some perfect VR tech 5,000 years from now. Okay, now a
| usecase: programming. I would rather program with a
| keyboard and mouse and a monitor. I don't want to talk to
| VR. I don't want a dumbass virtual keyboard, that's
| worse. The 3D stuff makes no difference because I'm
| reading text. So even with alien technology, my current
| computer right now would beat it.
|
| With the phones you mention, when we envision some
| futuristic technology we can see how the phones would be
| useful. Same thing with TVs - I mean, people were
| envisioning wall-wide flat screens in the 60s. But when
| you do that with VR, the product still isn't very good.
| That's the difference, in my eyes.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| Sure, but this is a different value proposition. FB paid
| $1B for Instagram, which was trendy, growing fast, and
| already had 30 million users. FB paid $19B for Whatsapp,
| which was already established worldwide with ~400 million
| users. These acquisitions were very much in-line with
| FB's core product. The people saying it was risky were
| mostly just saying that it was a waste of money and that
| FB could have just beaten their competition instead of
| buying them.
|
| And bringing up VR is probably not the best comparison to
| make- sure, Meta is a leader here, and they are
| competitive with their AI team too. But "I'm sure it will
| have huge ROI in the near future" is just saying that it
| hasn't paid off and they don't have an obvious path to
| getting there. Shoving VR and the Metaverse into
| everyone's face hasn't paid off for several years, and
| the VR segment as a whole has remained niche despite
| being around for decades.
|
| This acquisition is different- AI is not Meta's core
| product, it's just something hot right now and CEOs are
| trying to figure out how to stuff it into their products
| and hoping they can figure out how to make money later.
| Plus, they paid a pretty big chunk of money for a company
| that does, what? Cleans data for LLM training? Meta's
| Llama team clearly has a good data group already. They
| paid for a few employees that are clearly popular amongst
| the executives in the tech industry, but I don't know how
| this will go in terms of attracting other talent. Unless
| Wang is bringing something secret along with him, I think
| this one is an overpayment- Meta will need to both figure
| out how AI makes them money and Wang will have to attract
| several billion dollars worth of talent to the team. I'm
| skeptical that people will talk about this the same way
| they will about Meta getting Yann LeCun to work for them
| for a lot less money.
| jordanb wrote:
| > it was a waste of money and that FB could have just
| beaten their competition instead of buying them.
|
| Correction, people were saying that FB _couldn 't_ beat
| their competition and _had to_ buy them.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| If people were saying that there was no way to beat them,
| then Instagram and WhatsApp weren't bad acquisitions.
| jordanb wrote:
| Facebook couldn't beat them on merit because it's not
| very good at what it does. It does, however, have money
| because it was good at one thing one time, and therefore
| it could solve its inability to execute with M&A.
| alex1138 wrote:
| 'Laughed at', but one of the things that's probably very
| likely also true is 'Now a prime target for antitrust
| violations' especially Whatsapp
|
| Acquisitions do happen but it's telling when the people
| whose company you bought publically disparage you (in
| other words it wasn't a peaceful takeover)
| jordanb wrote:
| > often pay off
|
| alrite
|
| > laughed at for overpaying for Instagram and Whatsapp
|
| That's not how it went down. They were laughed at for
| screwing up so badly that these apps were drinking their
| milkshake, and then they panicked and paid way more than
| any fundamental analysis would price these apps at,
| because they weren't actually buying an app, they were
| paying a ransom on their monopoly.
|
| > Their continued bet on VR is still highly criticized
|
| Because Zuckerberg thinks people are going to go around
| wearing his face hugger.
|
| > and I'm sure it will have huge ROI in the near future
|
| The "VR play" is predicated upon VR somehow taking even
| more time away from its users than cellphones do. The
| only way it works is if people put it on when they wake
| up and take it off when they go to bed. Heck, maybe leave
| it on in some kind of REM-mode so zuck can put ads in our
| dreams.
|
| Meta "succeeds" as you demonstrated, when they wait for
| someone else to outflank them, mostly by not being Meta
| because Meta is creepy and nobody likes it, and then they
| fire a money bomb at at. The way for VR could have
| succeeded is if Occulus stayed independent and focused on
| gaming where it shines for another decade, and then as
| people start to feel like it could be a building block
| for something more, snatch it out from under them.
| Instead Zuck bought it too early and smothered it with
| his empire of ick.
| majormajor wrote:
| >If Meta is known for anything besides user privacy
| violations it's for taking risks that often pay off.
| [...] Their continued bet on VR is still highly
| criticized, yet they were the first Big Tech company in
| the space, they're the current market leaders, and I'm
| sure it will have huge ROI in the near future.
|
| Are you using something that _hasn 't_ yet paid off as an
| example of how their big risks often pay off just because
| you are personally sure it will have huge ROI?
|
| But I'm not actually sure I agree with the premise.
|
| What risks is Meta known for taking? Instagram and
| Whatsapp purchases were defensive moves; they were
| laughed at for the _prices_ not for risk.
|
| Here they are similarly being laughed at for the _price_.
|
| Is there much risk beyond that?
|
| If Instagram had petered out and people had stayed on
| Facebook proper, they would've been fine. Same with
| Whatsapp. It's not like they've been trying to push
| people away from their core Facebook product. More the
| opposite - they've used acquisitions to try to push
| Facebook accounts to more people.
|
| Compare to Apple, letting Mac software flounder for a
| while while focused on growing the iPhone and iPad
| business. Risky, worked out. Compare to Microsoft, going
| down years of dead-ends trying to come up with a next-gen
| operating system - a big part of their core bread-and-
| butter - and then having to release the generally-panned
| Vista because they bet too big on stuff they couldn't
| realize with Longhorn. Risky, failed. Compare to Snap,
| even - turning _down_ Meta cash for independence. Risky,
| kinda meh results? But adding another social media app to
| a social media company 's portfolio? Less so.
|
| VR, on the other hand, _does_ seem like the closest
| analog here. Buying their way into a non-core-competency
| space. There they bought the undisputed leader but it
| still hasn 't paid off to date. Here? Eh....
| coliveira wrote:
| What the commenter is saying is that this is no risk at all
| because $14B is negligible money for Meta at a year-long
| scale. It can always be written off as an investment that
| didn't work. In a company with $1.73T market cap, this is
| sometimes the loss you get in a single day of trading.
| laborcontract wrote:
| Yes, $14B can be considered negligible, but it's a
| signal. My bet is that it's not a great one. Wang has
| been great at courting clients, time will tell us about
| how that translate to leadership.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Meta already had an AI division led by the venerable Yann
| LeCun - someone with actual AI bona fides. I'm not seeing
| any info about what this does to LeCun's position in Meta.
| megaman821 wrote:
| He runs a more far-future R&D AI lab and someone else
| runs Llama, Meta AI, PyTorch, etc.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| >What is the big risk here?
|
| That this is clearly the wrong person to hire? Maybe Demis or
| Ilya is worth $15B but Wang? Extremely odd choice...
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| I don't think either Demis or Ilya are available for $15bn.
| They're already both comfortably billionaires. Demis seems
| a sensible candidate for heir to the top job at Google in
| the long term. Ilya is away focusing on super intelligence.
|
| It's not clear to me why either would take a subservient
| role in a company flailing incoherently around AI, rather
| than stick with the incredibly high-leverage opportunities
| they both have now.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Agreed but if you're paying $15B for a single person you
| should at least aim high...
| motoxpro wrote:
| What a weird way to frame a business decision.
| bko wrote:
| Cash is the least concern. I listened to a podcast about the
| history of Microsoft and there were times where Gates said
| "at least it was only money" or something to that effect.
|
| Microsoft floundered an entire decade on mobile and Windows
| Vista when they were going to lose out on Google that was
| literally paying OEMs to use their software and Apple, who
| had a vertical stack and made money off hardware. Huge
| setback in terms of focus that took them a long time to
| recover from.
|
| The main constraint is focus of talent to work on one thing.
| This is a huge move in terms of coordinated effort into this
| space that may or may not pay off.
| paxys wrote:
| There's a pretty common saying in the tech industry - "if
| you can solve a problem by throwing money at it then it
| isn't really a problem".
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I've been in the tech industry a quarter century, I've
| never heard this "pretty common saying" before, and most
| importantly I don't think it makes any sense. If
| anything, tech excels at disruption, where smaller
| competitors and new ideas are able to solve problems
| where "just throwing money at it" has failed.
| paxys wrote:
| > I don't think it makes any sense
|
| > tech excels at disruption, where smaller competitors
| and new ideas are able to solve problems where "just
| throwing money at it" has failed
|
| I don't think you understand the saying then, because
| this is _exactly_ its point.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| D'oh, I fail at reading comprehension - I read the "can"
| as "can't" for some reason. Dunce cap for me.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I challenge you to name a tech unicorn who's biggest
| advantage wasn't the ability to hemorrhage money over a
| period of time that would've killed any normal business
| stone dead.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I have literally never heard this.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Absolutely bonkers perspective
| lr4444lr wrote:
| The risk is the lost time by betting on the wrong horse. I
| don't know much about Wang, but the current phase of the AI
| race will likely shake out winners and losers of the tech
| industry who persist for many years to come.
|
| Being first to achieve certain milestones matters a lot.
| layer8 wrote:
| Not betting on any horse is unlikely to make you a winner
| either, however.
| nova22033 wrote:
| Also..he can't be fired by the board.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| calling it a risk assumes the goal is success. sometimes you
| spend 15b not to win, but to make sure no one else does. its
| board control. meta didnt buy potential. they bought
| positioning. everything else is narrative dressing.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Mentioning his age to diminish his value and accomplishments is
| certainly a move.
|
| How old are you and what have you achieved more than Alexandr
| Wang?
| abletonlive wrote:
| Just downvote them and move on. HN gets more like reddit
| everyday and you can tell it's the reddit sentiment in this
| thread that's taken over
| layer8 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657
|
| See also https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:
| ~:text=Red...
| dstroot wrote:
| He was spending $5b a year on whatever the metaverse was
| supposed to be and even renamed the company. Does anyone here
| use it? I think he weathers what I consider failure well. Or,
| conversely he can take big risks without too much blowback.
| hbay wrote:
| it's 5b a quarter
| bardak wrote:
| He would still be unbelievably rich even if Meta went
| bankrupt. He is in the unique position to have majority
| control of one of the world's largest tech companies and can
| pretty much use it to do what ever he wants. I doubt he cares
| much about Facebook past it's ability to generate money at
| this point.
| written-beyond wrote:
| I actually ran into the Zuck eating Thai(could be wrong) food
| in Palo Alto at night. He was having dinner with his wife at
| the restaurants outdoor seating, sure looked risky for someone
| as important as him.
| deviation wrote:
| Reminds me of "Don't dig for the gold, sell the shovels".
|
| Could also be read:
|
| > Meta spends 10% of last year's revenue to acquire 49% of a top
| AI data company and poach their leadership, to ensure they are a
| key player in what could be a ~5-trillion dollar industry by
| 2033.
|
| Meta has a history of this. Acquiring Oculus (and leaning in on
| VR), Ray-Ban partnership (and leaning in on AR)... etc.
|
| These all just seem like decisions to ensure the company's
| survival (and participation) in whatever this AI revolution will
| eventually manifest into.
| ml-anon wrote:
| What top AI company? Certainly not Scale, right? You realise
| that frontier labs don't really use Scale anymore exactly
| because they can't be trusted not to sell their secret-sauce
| human data collection protocols. No-one in the industry takes
| this guy seriously.
| fnikacevic wrote:
| It's always a warning sign where the only thing I know about
| a CEO is how many podcasts and media events they do each
| week, and nothing about their business.
| kubb wrote:
| Remember the Metaverse delusion?
|
| People forgot about that as if Zuck wasn't walking around
| telling us we'd hang out with friends in virtual spaces, and do
| activities with goggles on.
|
| I really have got to think about that every time people act
| like these overvalued companies with unlimited funds know what
| they're doing.
| cma wrote:
| Roblox, Rec Room, Epic/Fortnite are worth about 10-20% of
| Meta. There is a market there, Horizon just hasn't worked out
| and they don't have anything like the amount of technology
| behind Unreal Engine/Fortnite or even Roblox, closer to Rec
| Room but without the game design chops.
| sensanaty wrote:
| I mean have you seen the interview he did with Theo Von? The
| guy is a straight up Alien in the way he talks and acts, all
| those memes about him being a lizard aren't exactly far off.
| Loughla wrote:
| He was isolated from the real world starting at around age,
| what, 22?
|
| I'm all for calling out his random flailing in this space
| for what it is, but it always strikes me as strange when
| people are surprised that he's weird and robotic. I'm
| betting he never learned how to actually interact with
| other professional humans.
|
| He's lived in a golden tower surrounded by people who agree
| with him or want something from him since he was 21 or 22.
| Imagine what you would be like if you didn't have any
| struggles from such an early age. Imagine what your
| personality would be like if you didn't have substantive,
| non-transactional, human interactions since the age of 22.
|
| I kind of feel bad for the guy. His wealth and fame have
| ensured that he would never be normal, or anything
| approaching normal. Think about it - how does he even know
| if he has a bad idea? Do you think there are a ton of
| people around him that want to call out whatever dumbass
| idea he has? I doubt it. B-b-b-illions of dollars tends to
| flavor conversations, I would imagine.
|
| That being said, I don't feel that bad, because he can
| literally change the world and chooses not to.
| eGQjxkKF6fif wrote:
| 'dumb fucks'
| https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/mark-
| zuck...
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Of course the actual shovels are GPUs in this case... so it
| makes your analogy even stranger.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the actual shovels are GPUs in this case_
|
| This deal brings into focus whether the shovels are data or
| GPUs. Advantage to data comes, surprisingly, in
| perishability: a GPU fleet remains cutting edge for only one
| product cycle.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Bringing up Oculus and VR is quite fitting, because I think
| it's the same problem. Meta is attempting to find their next
| business, but like with social media they don't really have a
| plan. It worked out well with Facebook and some of the
| purchases surrounding social media, but it was never a clear
| path to profit, so they slapped ads on it.
|
| Why does Meta want VR to work? Create the Meta-verse? We're
| back at why, what problem does it solve? Same with AI, what's
| the goal here, besides being an AI company?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The goal is to manipulate your stock price.
|
| Meta's product is not Instagram or Facebook. It's Meta's
| stock.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Just a thought, but VR/AR is constantly recording video and
| audio.
|
| It wouldn't surprise me if at least some of that data is
| being piped back to Meta. Data that can latter be used by
| LLMs to train on.
|
| Even if this isn't enabled on consumer models, on the
| corporate side it can make sense. Say you're a risk adjuster
| for a factory. Walk around with your VR headset. In real time
| MetaOshaHelper can identify issues, you can tag them
| yourself.
|
| Then send the video back to your on prem LLM for data
| processing. New hires get a VR headset which can use this
| data for help on boarding.
|
| Or... Robots will use the data and replace human workers
| entirely.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > In real time MetaOshaHelper can identify issues
|
| I sort of doubt that most business would want that. Sorry
| to latch on to one specific thing in an interesting
| comment. But just imagine having AI tracking in the
| workplace, e.g. OSHA violations, violations of building
| code and workplace regulations in general. You'd have
| shitty manufactures, builders, trucking companies,
| kitchens, warehouses and everything in between begging you
| to stop.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Does spell check make writing a book harder?
|
| Occasionally you're going to ignore things that get
| flagged, but I would love an AI to say oh by the way that
| machine over there isn't latched on correctly and can
| fall over if not corrected.
|
| It's cheaper than paying workers comp.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Sure, but have you see building inspectors on YouTube for
| instance? The amount of extra work would be insane and
| much harder to dispute in court.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Create the Meta-verse? We're back at why, what problem does
| it solve?
|
| theZuck doesn't have to be around other people in the -verse.
| For him, that's a great solve
| laborcontract wrote:
| Until now I've actually been a believer in the amount of money
| that Zuck has poured into metaverse investments. I'm not a
| believer of the metaverse per se, but a believer that innovation
| takes unafraid capex. The last thing you want to be is scared
| money like microsoft who chose to scuttle the hololense project
| over the thought of spending a couple extra billion dollars on
| it.
|
| But this deal really has left me with my head scratching. Scale
| is, to put it charitably, a glorified wrapper over workers in the
| Philippines. What meta gets in this deal is, in effect, is
| Alexander Wang. This is the same Wang who has said enough in
| public for me to think, "huh?" Said a lot of revealing stuff like
| at Davos (dont have the pull quotes off the top of my head) that
| made me realize he's just kind of a faker. A very good salesman
| who ultimately gets his facts off the same twitter feed we all
| do.
|
| On top of what makes this baffling is that Meta has very publicly
| faced numerous issues and setbacks due to very poor data from
| Scale that caused public fires in both companies. So you're
| bringing in a guy whose company has caused grief for your
| researchers, is not research nor product oriented, and expect to
| galvanize talent from both the inside and outside to move towards
| GAI? What is Mark thinking?
|
| Zuckerberg seems to have had all the pieces to make this work but
| I'm a lot less confident if I'm a shareholder now than a week
| ago. This is a huge miss.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Sam Altman is a huge risk to META. He has similar morals to
| Zuck and a much better technical team. If OpenAI turns on the
| slop generator, they could hit Facebook and Instagram hard.
| Wang is probably smart enough to help navigate that risk.
| dkdcio wrote:
| > said enough in public for me to think, "huh?"
|
| I love this phrasing
| az226 wrote:
| This is exactly my take. Are you me? :-)
|
| Well said!
| ml-anon wrote:
| The only way to understand this is by knowing: Meta already has
| two (!!) AI labs who are _already_ at existential odds with one-
| another and both are in the process of failing spectacularly.
|
| One (FAIR) is lead by Rob Fergus (who? exactly!) because the
| previous lead quit. Relatively little gossip on that one other
| than top AI labs have their pick of outgoing talent.
|
| The other (GenAI) is lead by Ahmad Al-Dahle (who? exactly!) and
| mostly comprises of director-level rats who jumped off the
| RL/metaverse ship when it was clear it was gonna sink and by
| moving the centre of genAI gravity from Paris where a lot of
| llama 1 was developed to MPK where they could secure political
| and actual capital. They've since been caught with their pants
| down cheating on objective and subjective public evals and have
| cancelled the rest of Llama 4 and the org lead is in the process
| of being demoted.
|
| Meta are paying absolute top dollar (exceeding OAI) trying to
| recruit superstars into GenAI and they just can't. Basically no-
| one is going to re-board the Titanic and report to Captain
| Alexandr Wang of all people. Its somewhat telling that they tried
| to get Koray from GDM and Mira from OAI and this was their 3rd
| pick. Rumoured comp for the top positions is well into the 10's
| of millions. The big names who are joining are likely to stay
| just long enough for stocks to vest and boomerang L+1 to an
| actual frontier lab.
| coliveira wrote:
| These people should better make a lot of money while they can,
| because for most of them their careers may be pretty short. The
| half life of AI technologies is measured in months.
| paxys wrote:
| This is exactly why Zuck feels he needs a Sam Altman type in
| charge. They have the labs, the researchers, the GPUs, and
| unlimited cash to burn. Yet it takes more than all that to
| drive outcomes. Llama 4 is fine but still a distant 6th or 7th
| in the AI race. Everyone is too busy playing corporate
| politics. They need an outsider to come shake things up.
| dongobread wrote:
| The corporate politics at Meta is the result of Zuck's own
| decisions. Even in big tech, Meta is (along with Amazon)
| rather famous for its highly political and backstabby
| culture.
|
| This is because these two companies have extremely
| performance-review oriented cultures where results need to be
| proven every quarter or you're grounds for laying off.
|
| Labs known for being innovative all share the same trait of
| allowing researchers to go YEARS without high impact results.
| But both Meta and Scale are known for being grind shops.
| moralestapia wrote:
| You forgot LeCunn, but yeah that guy's on its own death spiral.
| ml-anon wrote:
| No I didn't. He is functionally irrelevant at Meta and he
| doesn't actually lead anything.
| aipatselarom wrote:
| Weird, Meta says it's their Chief AI Scientist [1].
|
| But maybe they're wrong ...
|
| 1: https://ai.meta.com/people/396469589677838/yann-lecun/
| ml-anon wrote:
| Cool. So what does a chief AI scientist do?
| momoschili wrote:
| ideally lead AI science, but in reality mostly
| pontificate on social media. One could say that is
| fitting for Meta though right?
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Rob Fergus is one of the creators of FAIR. It makes sense for
| him to lead it.
| ml-anon wrote:
| Lead it where?
| nostromo wrote:
| Meta is struggling here for the same reason Microsoft couldn't
| stop the talent bleed to Google back in the day.
|
| Even if you're giving massive cash and stock comp, OpenAI has a
| lot more upside potential than Meta.
| az226 wrote:
| Microsoft back in the day and today still doesn't pay top
| dollar. So you can't get top talent with 65th percentile pay.
| ml-anon wrote:
| This is wrong. OpenAI has almost no upside now at these
| valuations and there is a >2 year effective cliff on any
| possibility of liquidity whereas Meta is paying 7-8 figures
| liquid.
|
| Metas problem is that everyone knows that it's a dumpster
| fire so you will only attract people who only care about comp
| which is typically not the main motivation for the best
| people.
| hoofhearted wrote:
| This is a very interesting buy because Scale AI has been spamming
| anyone and everyone on freelancer platforms; and they don't have
| a very good reputation online so far from people they have
| contracted with.
|
| Just go look at what people say about them on Reddit. It's rare
| to find anything positive, or even a single brand champion that
| had some sort of great experience with them.
| paxys wrote:
| Just like Uber, Doordash & co don't have a good reputation
| among their contract workers. The entire business model is
| based on exploitation of labor. That doesn't mean it isn't
| valuable (in a capitalist sense).
| hoofhearted wrote:
| No, those were entirely different user experiences when the
| services you mentioned were gaining traction and finding
| product market fit.
|
| UberCab and Palo Alto Delivery were both services that had
| great success at user experiences for everyone involved
| including drivers, riders, small businesses, people ordering
| food. These experiences created brand champions who went out
| and raved about these technological innovations nonstop.
|
| I don't see any mentions of any positive experiences with
| Scale Ai here on HN or Reddit.. maybe that's the reason
| behind the acquisition?
| paxys wrote:
| People on HN aren't the ones driving Ubers, so I'm not sure
| what experiences you are expecting to hear about. Go talk
| to actual drivers and you'll find that things aren't
| exactly rosy.
| noosphr wrote:
| Driving for Uber in 2010 was amazing.
|
| There were plenty of people on HN who signed up for the
| app to drive people back home before and after work.
|
| Being able to see your car move in real time on the uber
| database with >2s lag between your car GPS and customers
| phone was magical in a way that's hard to describe today.
| paxys wrote:
| Lots of things were amazing when there was unlimited VC
| money flowing in and no expectation of profit. No point
| bringing it up 15 years later in a new reality.
| noosphr wrote:
| Yes. But in this case it's terrible _even before the VC
| money runs out_.
| krosaen wrote:
| Anyone know what scale does these days beyond labeling tools that
| would make them this interesting to Meta? Data labeling tools
| seem more of a traditional software application and not much to
| do with AI models themselves that would be somewhat easily
| replicated, but guessing my impression is out of date. Also now
| apparently their CEO is leaving [1], so the idea that they were
| super impressed with him doesn't seem to be the explanation.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/13/scale-ai-confirms-
| signific...
| laborcontract wrote:
| This is by all indications the world's most expensive acquihire
| of a single person. Reporting has been that Zuckerberg has seen
| Wang as a confidant of sorts, and has proposed a vision of AI
| that's said to be non consensus.
| krosaen wrote:
| but did you see that now Wang is leaving as part of this?
| paxys wrote:
| He is leaving _to join Meta_.
| laborcontract wrote:
| He is leaving to now work at Meta.
| krosaen wrote:
| ah whoops, thanks.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| Fair enough. If you aren't willing to give your friend $14
| billion to join your company so you can hang out more, then
| are you two really friends?
| mjburgess wrote:
| I could see a friend giving me 4% of his net worth on those
| terms, esp. if i might return a few percent, in the
| fullness of time.
| rokobobo wrote:
| If a friend doesn't give you 4% of their net worth, how
| can you be certain you are one of their 25 closest
| friends?
| bee_rider wrote:
| It also seems like a sort of different situation with
| Zuck because, I'm pretty sure, he'll still be able to get
| by with only 96% of his net worth.
| michaelrwolfe1 wrote:
| Wang didn't get $14b, he only owns about 15% of Scale. We
| also don't know how much he sold. He could have sold all of
| his stock (netting him around $4.5b), none, or something in
| the middle.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| I've seen rumours that he is leaking what the other labs are
| using Scale for which may let Meta catch up...
| paxys wrote:
| I doubt Scale is interesting by itself. This is all about
| Alexandr Wang. Guy is in his mid 20s and has somehow worked his
| way up in Silicon Valley to the same stature as CEOs of multi
| trillion dollar companies. Got a front row seat at Trump's
| inaugration. Advises the DoD. Routinely rubs shoulders with
| world leaders. I can't say whether there's actual substance or
| not, by clearly Zuck sees something in him (probably a bit of
| himself).
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| It's a wild story for sure. Dropped out of MIT after freshman
| year and starts Scale to do data labeling. Three years later
| Scale has a $1B valuation and two years after that Wang is
| the world's youngest billionaire. Nine years after Scale's
| founding they're still doing less than $1B in annual revenue.
| Yet Meta is doing a $14B acquihire. There's definitely more
| than meets the eye. I suspect it involves multiple world
| governments including the US.
| tyre wrote:
| > Dropped out of MIT after freshman year and starts Scale
| to do data labeling
|
| I was in their YC batch, so two notes:
|
| 1. He didn't start it himself 2. They weren't doing data
| labeling when they entered YC. They pivoted to this.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply he started it alone. Though his
| co-founder Lucy Guo is almost as bizarre of a story as
| Wang himself. I'm curious, what were they doing before
| data labeling?
| moralestapia wrote:
| With all the respect that is due, Lucy didn't do cr*p and
| also left quite early.
|
| Scale is 99% Alex's credit.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Though his co-founder Lucy Guo is almost as bizarre
|
| Well, kind of. I went to school with Lucy, and she was a
| completely different person back then. Sure she was among
| the more social of the CS majors, but the gliz and
| glamour and weirdness with Lucy came after she got her
| fame and fortune.
|
| I suspect a similar thing happen with Wang. When you are
| in charge of a billion dollar business, you tend to grow
| into the billion dollar CEO.
|
| > what were they doing before data labeling?
|
| They were building an API for mechanical turks. Think
| "send an api call, with the words 'call up this pizza
| restaurant and ask if they are open'" and then this API
| call would cause a human to follow the instructions and
| physically call the restaurant, and type back a response
| that is sent back to your API call.
|
| The pivot to data labelling, as money poured into self
| driving cars, makes some amount of sense given their
| previous business idea. Is almost the same type of "API
| for humans" idea, except much more focussed on one
| specific usecase.
| andytratt wrote:
| nor did he finish it himself. the Scale team has always
| been extremely talent-dense.
|
| but execution is everything, and Alex has certainly been
| the dictator executing without peer or co-leads for over
| half a decade now.
|
| "API for human labor" a la MTurk was the original idea,
| was it not? pretty close to the data labeling thesis.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| > "API for human labor" a la MTurk was the original idea,
| was it not?
|
| That's how spammers bypassed captcha for decades
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| There are some stranger rumors too floating around.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| This is America, if you have tea, spill it!
| andytratt wrote:
| i don't know Alex directly that well but i believe his
| "freshman year" skipped all GIRs and was spent polishing
| off the most advanced graduate courses in CS theory
| (18.404), machine learning (6.867), algorithms (6.854),
| etc.
|
| so basically he did MIT at the PhD level in 1 year.
|
| As a classmate myself who did it in 3, at a high level too
| (and I think Varun - of Windsurf - completed his undergrad
| in 3 years also)...
|
| Wang's path and trajectory, thru MIT at least, is unmatched
| to my knowledge.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Not trying to diminish his academic accomplishments, but
| it isn't that uncommon for experienced freshman students
| to just jump straight into advanced topics. If you're the
| type that has been coding since you were 10, been active
| in Olympic teams, or whatever, you can probably do just
| fine in such courses.
|
| If anything, you'd be bored with some undergrad courses.
| npinsker wrote:
| That courseload is completely unremarkable for a first-
| year with experience in competitive programming (like
| Wang had). I know a dozen people who did the same.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| This guy looks like a front. How's behind him?
| moogly wrote:
| Shades of SBF?
| rybosome wrote:
| Scale has also built massive amounts of proprietary datasets
| that they license to the big players in training.
|
| Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. all use Scale data in
| training.
|
| So, the play I'm guessing is to shut that tap off for everyone
| else now, and double down on using Scale to generate more
| proprietary datasets.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Isn't this monopolistic?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Which is a primary reason Meta took a 49% stake in Scale vs
| buying them outright.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Ah, my mistake. I thought the arrangement was allowing
| for more control over access to the company. I should pay
| closer attention.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Isn't this monopolistic?_
|
| By whom? The fact that there is a list of competitors means
| Meta has no monopoly in AI. And Scale AI has no monopoly in
| labelled data.
|
| It's anticompetitive. But probably not to an illegal
| extent. Every "moat" is, after all, a measure in
| anticompetitiveness.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| yes probably. but it already is. there is also an
| assumption that meta would turn it off. not saying they
| will or will not just that there an assumption here.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I wondered that.
|
| But then huge revenue streams for Scale basically disappear
| immediately.
|
| Is it worth Meta spending all that money just to stop
| competitors using Scale? There are competitors who I am sure
| would be very eager to get the money from Google, OpenAI,
| Anthropic etc that was previously going to Scale. So Meta
| spends all that money for basically nothing because the
| competitors will just fill the gap if Scale is turned-down.
|
| I am guessing they are just buying stuff to try to be more
| "vertically integrated" or whatever (remember that Facebook
| recently got caught pirating books etc).
| moralestapia wrote:
| 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.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| > Yeah, also the industry could come up with their own
| Scale if they were forced to
|
| I worked at Outlier and it was such a garbage treatment
| zht wrote:
| is he not?
|
| what about the whole metaverse thing and renaming the
| whole company to meta?
| bornfreddy wrote:
| What about it? Imagine buying Twitter and renaming it to
| "X".
| moralestapia wrote:
| 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.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > 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.
| richardw wrote:
| "We went outside this weekend. Terrible. I wasn't hot
| anymore, the smog was everywhere. House was tiny. No AI
| to help with conversations and people were unfriendly.
| I'm staying plugged in, where we can fly amongst the
| stars on unicorns. Some say it's fake but I say life has
| been fake for a while."
| corimaith wrote:
| Meta has done great work on the underlying technology of
| the metaverse, but what they really need is a killer app.
| And I don't think Meta or really Silicon Valley types
| have the proper institutional ability or really cultural
| acumen to achieve it. We think back to Horizon Worlds
| that looked more like a amateur weekend asset flip than
| the product of a billion dollar conglomerate.
|
| If it does come, it will likely come from the gaming
| industry, building upon the ideas of former mmorpgs and
| "social" games like Pokemon Go. But recent string of AAA
| disasters should obviously tell you that building a good
| game is often orthogonal to the amount of funding or
| technical engineering. It's creativity, and artistic
| passion, and that's something that someone who spends
| their entire life in the real world optimizing their TC
| for is going to find hard to understand.
| lettergram wrote:
| Could be they need a perpetual license to the data too...
| so they could potentially sue everyone.
| trhway wrote:
| Meta buys 900 AI employees here at less than $20M/head.
| Pretty cheap these days. Any IP the company has is a bonus.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| It's a smart purchase, it's just that I don't see how these
| datasets factor into super-intelligence. I don't think you
| can create a super-intelligent AI with more human data, even
| if it's high-quality data from paid human contributors.
|
| Unless we watered-down the definition of super-intelligent
| AI. To me, super-intelligence means an AI that has an
| intelligence that dwarfs anything theoretically possible from
| a human mind. Borderline God-like. I've noticed that some
| people have referred to super-intelligent AI as simply AI
| that's about as intelligent as Albert Einstein in effectively
| all domains. In the latter case, maybe you could get there
| with a lot of very, _very_ good data, but it 's also still a
| leap of imagination for me.
| ryanblakeley wrote:
| Super-intelligent game-playing AIs, for decades, were
| trained on human data.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| I think this is kind of a philosphical distinction to a lot
| of people: the assumption is that a computer that can
| reason like a smart person but still runs at the speed of a
| computer would appear superintelligent to us. Speed is
| already the way we distinguish supercomputers from normal
| ones.
| psb217 wrote:
| I'd say superintelligence is more about producing deeper
| insight, making more abstract links across domains, and
| advancing the frontiers of knowledge than about doing
| stuff faster. Thinking speed correlates with intelligence
| to some extent, but at the higher end the distinction
| between speed and quality becomes clear.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If anything, "abstract links across domains" is the one
| area where even very low intelligence AI's will still
| have an edge, simply because any AI trained on general
| text has "learned" a whole lot of random knowledge about
| lots of different domains; more than any human could
| easily acquire. But again, this is true of AI's no matter
| how "smart" they are. Not related to any "super
| intelligence" specifically.
|
| Similarly, "deeper insight" may be surfaced occasionally
| simply by making a low-intelligence AI 'think' for
| longer, but this is not something you can count on under
| any circumstances, which is what you may well expect from
| something that's claimed to be "super intelligent".
| psb217 wrote:
| I don't think current models are capable of making
| abstract links across domains. They can latch onto
| superficial similarities, but I have yet to see an
| instance of a model making an unexpected and useful
| analogy. It's a high bar, but I think that's fair for
| declaring superintelligence.
|
| In general, I agree that these models are in some sense
| extremely knowledgeable, which suggests they are ripe for
| producing productive analogies if only we can figure out
| what they're missing compared to human-style thinking.
| Part of what makes it difficult to evaluate the abilities
| of these models is that they are wildly superhuman in
| some ways and quite dumb in others.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > It's a high bar, but I think that's fair for declaring
| superintelligence.
|
| I have to disagree because the distinction between
| "superficial similarities" and genuinely "useful"
| analogies is pretty clearly one of degree. Spend enough
| time and effort asking even a low-intelligence AI about
| "dumb" similarities, and it'll eventually hit a new and
| perhaps "useful" analogy simply as a matter of luck. This
| becomes even easier if you can provide the AI with a lot
| of "context" input, which is something that models have
| been improving at. But either way it's not
| superintelligent or superhuman, just part of the general
| 'wild' weirdness of AI's as a whole.
| psb217 wrote:
| I think you misunderstood what I meant about setting a
| high bar. First, passing the bar is a necessary but not
| sufficient condition for superintelligence. Secondly, by
| "fair for" I meant it's fair to set a high bar, not that
| this particular bar is the one fair bar for measuring
| intelligence. It's obvious that usefulness of an analogy
| generator is a matter of degree. Eg, a uniform random
| string generator is guaranteed to produce all possible
| insightful analogies, but would not be considered useful
| or intelligent.
|
| I think you're basically agreeing with me. Ie, current
| models are not superintelligent. Even though they can
| "think" super fast, they don't pass a minimum bar of
| producing novel and useful connections between domains
| without significant human intervention. And, our
| evaluation of their abilities is clouded by the way in
| which their intelligence differs from our own.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I don't know about "useful" but this answer from o3-pro
| was nicely-inspired, I thought: https://chatgpt.com/share
| /684c805d-ef08-800b-b725-970561aaf5...
|
| I wonder if the comparison is actually original.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| My POV, speed + good evaluation are all you need.
| Infinite monkeys and Shakespeare.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I'll believe that AI is anywhere near as smart as Albert
| Einstein in _any_ domain whatsoever (let alone science-
| heavy ones, where the tiniest details can be critical to
| any assessment) when it stops making stuff up with the
| slightest provocation. Current 'AI' is nothing more than a
| toy, and treating it as super smart or "super intelligent"
| may even be outright dangerous. I'm way more comfortable
| with the "stochastic parrot" framing, since we all know
| that parrots shouldn't always be taken seriously.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Earlier today in a conversation about how AI ads all look
| the same, I described them as 'clouds of usually' and 'a
| stale aftertaste of many various things that weren't
| special'.
|
| If you have a cloud of usually, there may be perfectly
| valid things to do with it: study it, use it for low-
| value normal tasks, make a web page or follow a recipe.
| Mundane ordinary things not worth fussing over.
|
| This is not a path to Einstein. It's more relevant to ask
| whether it will have deleterious effects on users to have
| a compliant slave at their disposal, one that is not too
| bright but savvy about many menial tasks. This might be
| bad for people to get used to, and in that light the
| concerns about ethical treatment of AIs are salient.
| echelon wrote:
| > It's a smart purchase, it's just that I don't see how
| these datasets factor into super-intelligence.
|
| It's a smart purchase for the data, and it's a roadblock
| for the other AI hyperscalers. Meta gets Scale's leading
| datasets and gets to lock out the other players from
| purchasing it. It slows down OpenAI, Anthropic, et al.
|
| These are just good chess moves. The "super-intelligence"
| bit is just hype/spin for the journalists and layperson
| investors.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| > These are just good chess moves. The "super-
| intelligence" bit is just hype/spin for the journalists
| and layperson investors.
|
| Which is kind of what I figured, but I was curious if
| anyone disagreed.
| mliker wrote:
| OpenAI and Anthropic rely on multiple data vendors for their
| models so that no outside company is aware of how they train
| their proprietary models. Forbes reported the other day that
| OpenAI had been winding down their usage of Scale data: https
| ://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2025/06/12/scale-a...
| egillie wrote:
| And scale doesn't even have the best data among these
| vendors so I also don't get this argument
| CyberMacGyver wrote:
| What are some other options ?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Yeah, but they know how to get the quality human labeled
| data at scale better than anyone -- and they know what
| Anthropic and OpenAI wanted -- what made it quality
| rlt wrote:
| Meta "will have a 49% stake in the artificial intelligence
| startup, but will not have any voting power"
|
| Wouldn't Scale's board/execs still have a fiduciary duty to
| existing shareholders, not just Meta?
| delusional wrote:
| Yes, but Meta would be able to kick the board and find
| another one more willing to accept their proposal as the
| best for shareholders.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Power struggles like this are weird to me. Is kicking the
| board likely to succeed at 49%? If so it feels like the
| control percentage isn't the primary factor in actual
| control.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You only need to convince 2% of the other stakeholders to
| get your way.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| At 49% I'm certain they would become the largest
| shareholder, by far. Then allying with another smaller
| shareholder to get majority - especially as you are Meta
| and can repay in various ways - is trivial. This is
| control, in all forms but name.
| mbesto wrote:
| The prevailing theory is that Meta did a 49% deal so it
| didn't set off anti-trust alarm bells. In other words, the
| 49% doesn't give them ultimate power, but you can best
| believe when Meta tells them to jump, the board and the
| execs are going to ask "how high?".
| logicchains wrote:
| It seems very short-sighted given how far Meta's latest model
| release was behind Qwen and DeepSeek, both of which relied
| heavily on automatically generated reasoning/math/coding data
| to achieve impressive results, not human annotated data. I.e.
| Scale's data is not going to help Meta build a decent
| reasoning model.
| knuppar wrote:
| > Also now apparently their CEO is leaving
|
| Leaving to join "Meta's super intelligence efforts", whatever
| that means.
| guluarte wrote:
| they use people for 3 world countries for labeling and fixing
| models responses, i guess the value is in the human capital
| eaglelamp wrote:
| It looks like security/surveillance play more than anything.
| Scale has strong relationships with the US MIC, the current
| administration (predating Zuck's rebranding), and gulf states.
|
| Their Wikipedia history section lists accomplishments that
| align closely with DoD's vision for GenAI. The current admin,
| and the western political elite generally, are anxious about
| GenAI developments and social unrest, the pairing of Meta and
| Scale addresses their anxieties directly.
| ForgedLabsJames wrote:
| Meta really love going all in with the hype tech hey!
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| I'm really not sure why they are acquihiring a digital sweatshop
| owner. It's not obvious that Wang has any special insight or
| expertise related to building a Superintelligence other than Data
| Annotation...
| ahoyhoy wrote:
| Scale's data annotation platform Outlier is managed with
| tragicomic, DOGE-style incompetence. It has been in failure
| mode since around January.
| 7moritz7 wrote:
| He knows what data cohere, openai and anthropic commission
| which is a major advantage and I doubt they'll continue relying
| on scale ai
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| I assume you could individually poach entire teams away from
| all 3 companies for much less than $100M so this is still a
| strange move.
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| My mother is 73. She uses Meta AI a lot. Her friends do too.
| Maybe Zuck knows what he is doing.
| paxys wrote:
| Because he put a big "AI" button on every single one of Meta's
| apps and surfaces. I'd bet that most of the usage is
| accidental. Great way to show inflated user counts in your
| earnings reports and get some directors promoted, sure, but not
| a long term strategy.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >She uses Meta AI a lot.
|
| How?
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| Health questions or things she would usually call us for.
| When I was surprised to learn her friends use it.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Interesting, thanks!
| b0a04gl wrote:
| scale sits on the request layer for data, labeling, eval loops.
| even without direct coordination, owning part of that pipe lets
| meta infer which teams are scaling, which modalities are getting
| attention, how fast the frontier's moving based on throughput and
| task complexity. it's telemetry without consent. they don't need
| your weights if they can see your ask patterns. that's the real
| intel layer nobody's talking about.
| htrp wrote:
| 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.
| the_mar wrote:
| scale does not own the data of most of it's large customers.
| _sword wrote:
| Sounds like meta gets the data and also anything they can scrape
| together about what the other labs have been doing to get better
| results than meta
| tzury wrote:
| This is as bold as Instagram and WhatsApp were at the time,
| typical Zuck move, most likely a successful story, perhaps bigger
| than the other two.
|
| See, when he paid $1 billion in 2012 for a 7 employees company,
| everybody thought it is the biggest mistake he made.
|
| Who he paid $21.8 billion in 2014 for 55 employees size messaging
| company, people said similar things, but both turned out to be a
| great success in market dominance.
|
| Scale serves the top tier AI companies, and Alexandr is a prodigy
| by all means, so hell ye.
|
| Unlike many other cases where M&A simply killed the companies /
| product, here it is going to be power multiplier, Meta's data to
| scale and back, will make scale better and meta's AI better.
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| so is this going to be the next big thing, like the metaverse?
| Werent we all supposed to be paying virtual rent?
| iamleppert wrote:
| Has anyone actually used Scale AI products? Their labeling tools
| are 100% pure trash.
| the_mar wrote:
| scale is no better or worse than any other labeling vendor.
| oxqbldpxo wrote:
| WCGW with Mark in charge of Ai? Nothing. How could a little
| "Like" button end up destroying world peace? Absurd.
| diggan wrote:
| > end up destroying world peace
|
| ... What world peace are you speaking of?
| sensanaty wrote:
| Is this the same company that has their recruiters (or whatever
| the hell they're called) spamming me incessantly via all my
| emails, even the throwaway ones I've used literally one single
| time that they presumably got via some unscrupulous means, about
| "annotating" data for training AI? And their rate is something
| laughable like 20 euros an hour?
|
| We truly live in a clown world when a casual $14B is being
| chucked at garbage like this, I hope those Iranian nukes turn out
| to be real this time and I get to be the first in line to be
| cleansed via nuclear fire, 'cause I'm tired boss.
| epsilonthree wrote:
| I work at Meta. Scale has given us atrocious data so many times,
| and gotten caught sending us ChatGPT generated data multiple
| times. Even the WSJ knew: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/alexandr-
| wang-scale-ai-d7c6efd7 https://archive.is/5mbdH
|
| We intentionally didn't use them at all for Llama 2 and mostly
| avoided using them for Llama 3, but execs kept pushing Scale on
| us. Total mystery why until now, guess this explains it.
| sensanaty wrote:
| Interesting that your comment got flagged almost
| instantaneously
| dang wrote:
| It was initially killed by a software filter. Those are tuned
| more strictly for (some) new accounts. It had nothing to do
| with the content of the comment, though admittedly that is
| less "interesting".
|
| For anyone who doesn't know: if you see a comment which is
| [dead] but shouldn't be, you can vouch for it
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch).
| laborcontract wrote:
| How do you feel about him now becoming an exec?
| adamredwoods wrote:
| The goal of AGI for these companies is to replace human workers.
| paxys wrote:
| Funny because Scale AI relies entirely on human workers (for
| data labeling).
| adamredwoods wrote:
| But that's not their long-term goal.
| HardCodedBias wrote:
| A few possibilities:
|
| 1. Mark no longer wants to run the company and he is picking
| alexander wang. 2. Mark believes that Ai is the top priority, his
| teams have failed, (this is all clearly true so far) and he wants
| completely change the org structure of his AI efforts (not
| recommendation but everything else). 3. Mark wants to cut off the
| supply of information to other labs 4. Mark thinks that full
| access to ScaleAi's data could accelerate their research and
| _somehow_ they couldn 't do this with a less expensive options.
|
| (2) seems semi-reasonable (in that Meta has failed with near
| infinite resources) but acquiring a handful of execs for this
| price seems absurd.
|
| (3) seems like a conspiracy theory and the technology is moving
| away from this path of data collection, although it is still
| important at this very moment.
|
| (4) Maybe.
|
| I guess some combination of all 4 is plausible. But the amount of
| money seems, frankly, absurd.
| eitally wrote:
| I wonder if it's really an adjacent benefit to your #4: Mark
| doesn't just get full access to Scale's data, they also get
| access to an army of >100,000 data labelers to use however they
| want.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Well if there's one thing the AI segment is lacking, it's
| funding.
| visarga wrote:
| Why link to this copyright maximalist site with paywall? They
| argued against copyright in 2001 (NYT vs Tasini) when it was in
| their favor, and recently pro copyright (NYT vs OpenAI) because
| it was in their ..favor. They want to put restrictions on our
| creativity, to extend copyright from expression to abstractions.
| I would not touch it with a 10 foot pole.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/meta-ai-superintelligence-agi-sca...
| 1024core wrote:
| I haven't read the article yet (I'm about to) but I'm curious:
| what are Yann's views on this? He's been pretty vocal that LLMs
| won't lead to AGI.
|
| Edit: read the article. No mention of Yann. What kind of
| journalists are these people, to not get viewpoints from
| different angles? They might as well just reproduce press
| releases and be done with it.
| crowcroft wrote:
| I'm not sure if that's really relevant?
|
| You can believe LLMs won't lead to AGI and still believe that
| spending billions to have a best in class model will allow you
| to make products that will recoup that investment.
| tummler wrote:
| Meta buying their way into trends generally seems to pan out (WA,
| Insta, Oculus). Any reason to think this will be different? I'm
| not familiar with Scale but the particulars of this deal seem odd
| to me.
| sampl3username wrote:
| Why is people letting these unelected companies reshape the
| world?
| ralfd wrote:
| Honest question: Do you want elected politicians reshape the
| world?
| sampl3username wrote:
| I'd prefer that to companies.
| guluarte wrote:
| Outlier isn't worth 14.3 billion...
| owebmaster wrote:
| Their gains from ScaleAI's next raise will pay this
| thecrumb wrote:
| Meta developers can't even make Marketplace search work properly.
| I can't seem them making a 'super intelligence' LOL
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| Isn't that why they are paying scale?
| islewis wrote:
| This appears to be a psuedo-acquisition, but with a strange
| format to appease regulators.
|
| Will this still be an exit event for employees or do they get
| screwed here?
| molsongolden wrote:
| Sounds like they're getting paid based on his note to
| employees:
|
| > "The proceeds from Meta's investment will be distributed to
| those of you who are shareholders and vested equity holders
| [...] The exceptional team here has been the key to our
| success, so I'm thrilled to be able to return the favor with
| this meaningful liquidity distribution."
|
| https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/1933328165306577316
| tibbar wrote:
| Yes, it is very good for employees and ex-employees.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I just don't get why Scale and/or Alexandr Wang are so important
| to Meta. Like sure, data is good and all, but does Scale really
| bring something so unique and valuable to the table? What vision
| or insight does Wang offer that's worth so much?
| az226 wrote:
| Puzzling indeed. Just watch an interview with him. Nothing
| insightful, just trendy buzzword wordvomit.
| ks2048 wrote:
| > Nothing insightful, just trendy buzzword wordvomit.
|
| That is my impression of his Twitter feed from what I
| remember.
| lyime wrote:
| Good hire.
| ahmed_ssh wrote:
| I have been working at Scale for 2yrs now. Their data is shit,
| the majority of the contributions live in the 3rd world and all
| of them use gpt and other big models. I'm eagerly waiting for the
| AI hype to disappear to see all those corporates lose their
| money.
| mparnisari wrote:
| You want your own employer to fail?
| varjag wrote:
| What's up with metaverese Zuck?
| Henchman21 wrote:
| It doesn't seem at all wise to give the least ethical among us
| access to a super intelligence. Not trying to single out Zuck
| specifically, though his challenges with ethics do seem well
| documented.
|
| Rather, I'm speaking about the entire industry. Humanity isn't
| demanding this, only those at the top seem to want it, and they
| seem to want it so they can keep more share of the pie for
| themselves, and decrease the size of everyone else's share.
|
| It feels like we're at a very ugly crossroads.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Sorry, can you tell me what's new ?
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Sure! It seems they have an actual chance to succeed in their
| anti-people crusade. That is markedly different than in the
| past.
|
| Just my 2-cents. Meaningless in the face of it all :)
| throwawaybob420 wrote:
| But how else would I be able to generate highly realistic
| photos of shrimp Jesus? Surely that's more important than
| everything else...
| jakupovic wrote:
| So Scale needs $14.3B to run their models/etc. That's what I read
| into this.
| Rebuff5007 wrote:
| I dont understand, why would they make a super-intelligence group
| instead of something more ambitious like a super-super
| intelligence group or supreme-mega-intelligence group? Zuck is
| clearly not thinking this one through.
| belter wrote:
| It's just the same team with a new Slack channel.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| Posting for postarity, I long said everyone needed to stop
| everything they were doing and we all put 100% of our effort
| towards AI.
|
| If AI is solved (we don't have AI yet) then many other problems
| get solved too.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Seems like desperation to convince the industry that they're
| still relevant in AI after the fiasco that was Llama4. Scale
| doesn't create foundational models, they compile proprietary
| datasets that everyone has already licensed and trained on - not
| a lot of reoccurring value. Maybe this slows down competitors a
| bit but I doubt it.
| very_good_man wrote:
| Facebook invests in the US Army
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-13 23:00 UTC)