Meta reportedly in talks to invest billions of dollars in Scale AI

Meta is discussing a multibillion-dollar investment in Scale AI, according to Bloomberg. In fact, the deal value could reportedly exceed $10 billion, making it the largest external AI investment by Facebook’s parent company and one of the largest funding events ever for a private company.

Scale AI (whose CEO Alexandr Wang is pictured above) provides data labeling services to companies such as Microsoft and OpenAI to help them train their AI models. Much of that labeling work is done by contractors — in fact, the Department of Labor recently dropped its investigation into whether the company was misclassifying and underpaying employees.

According to Bloomberg, the company saw $870 million in revenue last year and expects to bring in $2 billion this year.

Meta was already an investor in Scale AI’s $1 billion Series F, which valued the company at $13.8 billion. Scale AI also built Defense Llama, a large language model designed for military use, on top of Meta’s Llama 3.