Scale AI
More info
- Creator
- Alexandr Wang, Lucy Guo
- Released
- 2016–
- Type
- Training data and data labeling
The company that sells the human labour behind machine learning: labelled images, ranked answers and checked examples.
Alexandr Wang, then 19, and Lucy Guo founded Scale AI in 2016 through Y Combinator. Its first customers were self-driving car programmes that needed millions of images with every pedestrian and road sign outlined by hand. The work was done by tens of thousands of contractors, many in Kenya and the Philippines, through platforms such as Remotasks and later Outlier.
Once language models took over, the product changed: people writing examples and ranking model outputs for RLHF. In June 2025 Meta bought 49 percent of the company for around $14 billion, and Wang moved to Meta to run its superintelligence effort. Several of Scale's biggest customers, OpenAI and Google among them, scaled back soon after. Neutrality, apparently, had been part of what was for sale.