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Scale has also built massive amounts of proprietary datasets that they license to the big players in training. Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. all use Sc
by rybosome 1y ago
Scale has also built massive amounts of proprietary datasets that they license to the big players in training.
Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. all use Scale data in training.
So, the play I’m guessing is to shut that tap off for everyone else now, and double down on using Scale to generate more proprietary datasets.
- steve_adams_86 1y agoIsn’t this monopolistic?
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoWhich is a primary reason Meta took a 49% stake in Scale vs buying them outright.
- steve_adams_86 1y agoAh, my mistake. I thought the arrangement was allowing for more control over access to the company. I should pay closer attention.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Isn’t this monopolistic? By whom? The fact that there is a list of competitors means Meta has no monopoly in AI. And Scale AI has no monopoly in labelled data. It’s anticompetitive. But probably not to an illegal extent. Every “moat” is, after all, a measure in anticompetitiveness.
- sumtechguy 1y agoyes probably. but it already is. there is also an assumption that meta would turn it off. not saying they will or will not just that there an assumption here.
- mattlondon 1y agoI wondered that. But then huge revenue streams for Scale basically disappear immediately. Is it worth Meta spending all that money just to stop competitors using Scale? There are competitors who I am sure would be very eager to get the money from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic etc that was previously going to Scale. So Meta spends all that money for basically nothing because the competitors will just fill the gap if Scale is turned-down. I am guessing they are just buying stuff to try to be more "vertically integrated" or whatever (remember that Facebook recently got caught pirating books etc).
- moralestapia 1y agoYeah, also the industry could come up with their own Scale if they were forced to. But probs. it just makes sense on paper, Scale's revenue will pay this for itself and what they could do is to give/keep the best training sets for Meta, for "free" now. Zuck's not an idiot. The Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions were phenomenal in hindsight.
- varelse 1y ago[dead]
- koakuma-chan 1y ago> Yeah, also the industry could come up with their own Scale if they were forced to I worked at Outlier and it was such a garbage treatment
- zht 1y agois he not? what about the whole metaverse thing and renaming the whole company to meta?
- bornfreddy 1y agoWhat about it? Imagine buying Twitter and renaming it to "X".
- moralestapia 1y ago
- Bjorkbat 1y agoIt's a smart purchase, it's just that I don't see how these datasets factor into super-intelligence. I don't think you can create a super-intelligent AI with more human data, even if it's high-quality data from paid human contributors. Unless we watered-down the definition of super-intelligent AI. To me, super-intelligence means an AI that has an intelligence that dwarfs anything theoretically possible from a human mind. Borderline God-like. I've noticed that some people have referred to super-intelligent AI as simply AI that's about as intelligent as Albert Einstein in effectively all domains. In the latter case, maybe you could get there with a lot of very, very good data, but it's also still a leap of imagination for me.
- ryanblakeley 1y agoSuper-intelligent game-playing AIs, for decades, were trained on human data.
- Fraterkes 1y agoI think this is kind of a philosphical distinction to a lot of people: the assumption is that a computer that can reason like a smart person but still runs at the speed of a computer would appear superintelligent to us. Speed is already the way we distinguish supercomputers from normal ones.
- psb217 1y agoI'd say superintelligence is more about producing deeper insight, making more abstract links across domains, and advancing the frontiers of knowledge than about doing stuff faster. Thinking speed correlates with intelligence to some extent, but at the higher end the distinction between speed and quality becomes clear.
- zozbot234 1y agoIf anything, "abstract links across domains" is the one area where even very low intelligence AI's will still have an edge, simply because any AI trained on general text has "learned" a whole lot of random knowledge about lots of different domains; more than any human could easily acquire. But again, this is true of AI's no matter how "smart" they are. Not related to any "super intelligence" specifically. Similarly, "deeper insight" may be surfaced occasionally simply by making a low-intelligence AI 'think' for longer, but this is not something you can count on under any circumstances, which is what you may well expect from something that's claimed to be "super intelligent".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mliker 1y agoOpenAI and Anthropic rely on multiple data vendors for their models so that no outside company is aware of how they train their proprietary models. Forbes reported the other day that OpenAI had been winding down their usage of Scale data: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2025/06/12/scale-ais-business-could-collapse-if-meta-buys-a-stake-and-hires-its-ceo/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2025/06/12/scale-a...
- egillie 1y agoAnd scale doesn’t even have the best data among these vendors so I also don’t get this argument
- CyberMacGyver 1y agoWhat are some other options ?
- dr_dshiv 1y agoYeah, but they know how to get the quality human labeled data at scale better than anyone — and they know what Anthropic and OpenAI wanted — what made it quality
- rlt 1y agoMeta “will have a 49% stake in the artificial intelligence startup, but will not have any voting power” Wouldn’t Scale’s board/execs still have a fiduciary duty to existing shareholders, not just Meta?
- delusional 1y agoYes, but Meta would be able to kick the board and find another one more willing to accept their proposal as the best for shareholders.
- unshavedyak 1y agoPower struggles like this are weird to me. Is kicking the board likely to succeed at 49%? If so it feels like the control percentage isn't the primary factor in actual control.
- pixl97 1y agoYou only need to convince 2% of the other stakeholders to get your way.
- rlt 1y agoThey don’t have voting power.
- flyinglizard 1y agoAt 49% I'm certain they would become the largest shareholder, by far. Then allying with another smaller shareholder to get majority - especially as you are Meta and can repay in various ways - is trivial. This is control, in all forms but name.
- tyre 1y agoanother shareholder, one of the largest, is the now-former-CEO who now works at Meta. They have full control.
- logicchains 1y agoIt seems very short-sighted given how far Meta's latest model release was behind Qwen and DeepSeek, both of which relied heavily on automatically generated reasoning/math/coding data to achieve impressive results, not human annotated data. I.e. Scale's data is not going to help Meta build a decent reasoning model.