• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, Yesterday

Securing essential data for AI training models, accelerating development, supporting partnerships, gaining a competitive edge and improving performance are just some of the reasons that Meta might want to invest $10 billion in a 2016 startup founded by two former Quora executives. Here are some others.

AI and data have become the perfect combination of technology for advertising, as I wrote in today’s Data & Programmatic Insider.

Now Meta reportedly plans to throw billions into an AI startup entrenched in data.

Clean data for training AI models is crucial for performance-based advertising. It ensures that models learn accurate patterns that lead to reliable predictions.

Scale AI has become a key provider of qualified data. The company can improve performance and reduce AI training time by ensuring that data sources are accurately labeled and annotated. This helps the system make sense of data input streams to improve the training process. 

According to Bloomberg, Meta has advanced talks to invest up to $10 billion into Scale, on top of the $1 billion Series F round in May 2024 with Amazon.

If it happens, this investment would represent Meta’s largest AI investment in an external company, and a departure from a strategy where it has largely relied on its in-house data and research. The move would give Meta its own AI model training data outside of its network of companies.

Meta plans to invest approximately $65 billion in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure this year. This investment, announced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is part of a broader strategy to make AI a key focus for the company and build out its AI capabilities. 

Meta is also building a massive data center and aims to end the year with over 1.3 million GPUs to support its AI initiatives. 

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, is pushing to make the company technology, Llama, a global standard. He has made the technology his top priority. In January, he told investors his plan is to spend as much as $65 billion on AI investments this year.

Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang co-founded the company in 2016 with Luci Guo. The two formerly worked at Quora.

The initial goal of the company was to address the need for accurately labeled data in AI development, so it relies on contract workers to clear up text, images and other types of unstructured data. It then tags it.

This helps AI models understand the data and improve performance. The company eventually gained traction by supporting companies such as General Motors. It also supports Microsoft and OpenAI.