India, June 13 -- Meta Platforms has agreed to invest $14.3 billion for a 49 percent, non-voting stake in data-labeling pioneer Scale AI implying a $29 billion valuation and will recruit its 28-year-old co-founder and CEO, Alexandr Wang, to spearhead a new "superintelligence" division.
Under the deal, Scale's chief strategy officer, Jason Droege, will step in as interim CEO, and a small contingent of Scale employees will transition to Meta alongside Wang. Meta said the partnership will deepen collaboration on the vast, accurately annotated datasets critical to training advanced AI models.
Wang, who dropped out of MIT to launch Scale in 2016, rapidly built the company into a leading provider of human-validated training data for application...