Meta said on Thursday that it planned to invest nearly $15 billion in Scale AI, a start-up that works with data to train artificial intelligence systems, in a deal that Meta hopes will add needed muscle to its disappointing A.I. division.
As a condition of the deal, Alexandr Wang, Scale AI’s 28-year-old chief executive, plans to join Meta in a top leadership role in the new division, which Meta is calling its Superintelligence lab. Mr. Wang, whom people inside Meta have taken to calling a visionary leader, will also bring a team of employees from Scale AI to work at Meta.
The move to invest billions in Scale AI, an amount equal to about 10 percent of Meta’s revenue in 2024, would be Meta’s first major minority investment in an outside company. It is Meta’s second-largest deal, after the $19 billion acquisition of the messaging app WhatsApp about 11 years ago.
Meta is scrambling to catch up with A.I. competitors such as Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, as industry executives jockey for an edge in what they believe will be the most transformative technology in a generation.
“Meta has finalized our strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI,” a spokesperson for Meta said in a statement. “As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for A.I. models, and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts.”
Meta’s investment with Scale AI is unusually structured. Meta will take a minority stake in the start-up and receive little control over its direction.
The structure was intentional. Executives at Meta and Scale AI were worried about drawing the attention of regulators. Meta is waiting on a federal judge’s decision in an antitrust case scrutinizing its earlier acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
The Federal Trade Commission under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was skeptical of big technology acquisitions, and Lina Khan, who led the agency at the time, scrutinized multibillion-dollar investments in A.I. companies. The structure of those deals — which included Amazon’s investments in Anthropic and Microsoft’s backing of OpenAI — allowed the big companies to form close ties with smaller rivals while dodging regulatory issues.
It is unclear if the F.T.C. under its new chairman, Andrew Ferguson, will continue down that path. But Mr. Ferguson has shown few signs of changing course.
OpenAI kicked off the A.I. movement in late 2022 with the release of its chatbot ChatGPT, compelling companies like Google and Meta to build similar technologies. Meta found an important niche when it chose to open source its systems, freely sharing the underlying tech with developers and businesses. But its latest system, called LLAMA4, has not matched the technologies produced by its biggest rivals.
Among technologists, superintelligence is a futuristic goal of A.I. development. OpenAI, Google and others have said their immediate aim is to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. Superintelligence, if it can be developed, would go beyond A.G.I.
Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent for The Times based in San Francisco. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley.
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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