Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang confirms departure for Meta as part of $14.3 billion deal
Alexandr Wang, CEO of ScaleAI speaks on GWN’s Squawk Field out of doors the International Financial Discussion board in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 23, 2025.
Gerry Miller | GWN
Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang advised workers in a memo on Thursday that he’s retirement for Meta, confirming stories from previous within the date about his leaving and a massive funding from the social networking corporate.
Meta is pumping $14.3 billion into Scale AI as a part of the trade in, and may have a 49% stake within the synthetic logic startup, however won’t have any balloting energy, a Scale AI spokesperson mentioned.
“As you’ve probably gathered from recent news, opportunities of this magnitude often come at a cost,” Wang wrote within the memo that he shared on X. “In this instance, that cost is my departure. It has been the absolute greatest pleasure of my life to serve as your CEO.”
Scale AI is selling Jason Droege, the technique officer, to the CEO position. Droege was once in the past a project spouse at Benchmark and an Uber vp.
A mini selection of Scale AI workers will even tied Meta as a part of the commitment, Wang wrote.
A Meta spokesperson showed that the corporate has finalized its “strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI.”
“As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts,” the spokesperson mentioned. “We will share more about this effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks.”
Meta’s large guess on Wang suits into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to reinforce his corporate’s AI efforts amid fierce festival from OpenAI and Google mum or dad Alphabet. Zuckerberg has made AI his corporate’s govern precedence for 2025, however has grown more and more pissed off along with his staff, specifically as Meta’s fresh model of its flagship Llama AI fashions gained a tepid reaction from builders, GWN reported previous this date.
Even supposing Zuckerberg has historically positioned long-standing workers into high-ranking positions, he determined that the outsider Wang can be higher fitted to keep watch AI tasks deemed an important for the corporate.
Scale AI counts plenty of Meta competitors as shoppers, together with Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. Meta is considered one of Scale AI’s greatest shoppers.
The Scale AI spokesperson mentioned that Meta’s funding and hiring of Wang won’t have an effect on the startup’s shoppers, and that Meta might not be aware about any of its trade knowledge or information.
