File Photo: Jason Droege will speak at the WSJTech Live Conference held in Laguna Beach, California on October 22, 2019.
Mike Blake | Reuters
Jason Droege, interim CEO of Scale AI, said in a memo on Wednesday that the artificial intelligence startup has not changed courses Meta Last week, billions of dollars invested in the company.
“Unlike some other recent tech deals you've heard of in the AI space, this isn't pivot or winding,” Droege wrote in a post aimed at customers, employees and investors.
Social media companies don't have the power to vote, but Meta has a stake of 49% after an investment of $14.3 billion. Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang will join Meta as part of the contract, along with a few other scale employees.
“Scale is a clearly independent company,” wrote Doroge. “This deal rewards many people who helped build the scale as it is today, but more importantly, it's also a validation of the course we're in.”
Scale AI was appointed Droege, the company's Chief Strategy Officer, and served as interim chief executive officer following the contract. Droege writes that Scale AI is a “resourced company” with “multiple promising business lines.”
Founded in 2016, Scale AI has become well-known by helping major tech companies like Openai, Google and Microsoft prepare the data they use to train cutting edge AI models. Meta is one of the biggest customers in AI's scale.
Droege said the company is “not slowing down” and continues to be committed to its data and application business unit. Scale will also remain an agnostic model, he added.
“The need for high quality data for AI models remains important and is the biggest network of AI training, so we are well set up to help model builders keep pushing what is possible on the frontier,” writes Droge.
However, some scale AI tech customers may be questioning.
Openai confirmed on Wednesday to CNBC that it has been putting together work on scale AI for the past six to 12 months. The company said it aims to work with other data providers that are responsive to innovation, and that the decision to remove work at scale has not been affected by the metapartnership.
Google Reuters reports that following the deal with Meta, the company will reportedly cut its relationship with Meta. Google declined to comment.
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