The news: Meta is in talks to invest upwards of $10 billion in Scale AI, a data labeling startup. The deal would be Meta’s biggest ever external AI investment and could help it position its Llama large language model (LLM) as an industry standard, per Bloomberg.
Scale AI has already partnered with Meta to develop Defense Llama, an LLM designed for military use that’s built on Llama 3, and also works with Meta competitors like Microsoft and OpenAI.
Why this startup? Improving AI models requires high-quality data from a variety of databases and sources, and cleaning up that data can be a big undertaking. Scale AI cleans and prepares image and text data for AI training, a service that could be a major time-saver for Meta as it works to scale Llama.
Why it matters: A Scale AI investment would mark Meta’s move away from in-house-only research.
- Meta may have decided that getting data labeling resources externally is a quick way to address dwindling AI model training resources.
- Llama lags behind competing products from OpenAI, DeepSeek, and others, meaning Meta may have decided that investing in outside infrastructure is the fastest way to catch up.
Our take: Meta’s massive investment could draw antitrust scrutiny in an era of acqui-hires.
The outcome of active probes in Big Tech partnerships could influence regulatory action, especially if this investment contains any exclusivity that limits model training resources for other companies.
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