Reports indicate that Meta is poised to invest $15 billion for a 49% ownership stake in Scale AI. This deal would potentially position Scale’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, as the leader of Meta’s new AI division focused on achieving “superintelligence.”
Scale AI, established in 2016, is a prominent company known for employing a global workforce to annotate or generate data crucial for training AI systems.
The agreement is projected to significantly benefit Wang and his colleagues holding equity in Scale AI, further increasing Wang’s already substantial wealth. For Meta, it represents a chance to revitalize its efforts to compete with AI leaders like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
However, experts suggest that Scale AI’s contract workers, who often earn minimal wages through a subsidiary called RemoTasks, are unlikely to gain from this deal. These data workers are typically paid per task, which includes activities like content , answering questions, or evaluating chatbot responses to enhance AI’s alignment with human preferences.
(TIME maintains a content partnership with Scale AI.)
Callum Cant, a senior lecturer at the University of Essex, specializing in gig work platforms, believes that Scale’s annotators will likely see no benefits from the deal, as they generally lack ownership stakes in the company.
Many of these workers already face challenges due to low pay and unfavorable working conditions. A recent by Oxford University’s Internet Institute revealed that Scale’s RemoTasks subsidiary failed to meet fundamental standards for fair pay, contracts, management, and worker representation.
Jonas Valente, an Oxford researcher involved in the report, emphasizes that Scale’s value is significantly derived from data work services provided by a large workforce of underpaid and poorly protected workers. He notes that the company still falls short of ensuring basic standards of fair work, despite some attempts to improve its practices.
The Meta deal is not expected to improve these conditions. Valente suggests that the increasing profits of digital labor platforms like Scale AI do not typically translate into better conditions for their workers.
A Scale AI spokesperson has not commented on the story. However, the company previously stated to TechCrunch that it is proud of the flexible earning opportunities provided through its platforms.
Meta’s investment also raises questions about whether Scale AI will continue to provide data to OpenAI and Google, two of its major clients. In the increasingly competitive AI field, observers believe that Meta might strategically restrict its rivals’ access to annotated data, which is essential for developing smarter AI systems.
Cant questions whether Meta’s acquisition of Scale AI could lead to denying competitors access to its data annotation platform. He notes that this depends on Meta’s overall strategy.
If this were to occur, Cant suggests that it could negatively impact wages and available tasks for workers, many of whom already struggle to make a living through data work.
A Meta spokesperson has also declined to comment on this story.
