The deal, tipped to be announced this week, will value Scale AI at a hefty $28 billion and marks yet another instance of Big Tech throwing its wallet at a problem it can’t code its way out of. Meta’s also nabbing Scale AI’s co-founder Alexandr Wang and his top research boffins to front a shiny new "superintelligence" lab meant to one-up its rivals.

Scale AI made its name by labelling data so AI models don’t mistake a dog for a banana and has now apparently doubled its valuation for the second year running. That should give the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street a warm fuzzy feeling, though it throws a spanner in Wang’s earlier talk of taking the company public.

Zuckerberg's  latest Llama 4 model failed to impress, flopping on reasoning and coding tests while others pushed out methods that solved problems. Meanwhile, upstarts like DeepSeek are building powerful open source models without the Silicon Valley drama or price tag.

Mark Zuckerberg has reshuffled his AI operations so many times it’s hard to keep track, most recently waving goodbye to Joelle Pineau, vice president of AI research. The latest pivot seems to follow the Microsoft playbook: buy a start-up, grab the clever people, and hope regulators are too distracted to notice.

Scale AI’s new boss is expected to be Uber Eats alumnus Jason Droege, while the future of the remaining staff looks less certain. In the meantime, the company has been trying to diversify its revenue streams by going after enterprise gigs and government contracts, likely hoping to stay relevant once the big boys finish raiding the talent cupboard.

Meta declined to comment and Scale AI is keeping its lips sealed too. But this won’t stop anyone from drawing comparisons to Microsoft’s $650 million poaching of Inflection’s team or Google’s $2.7 billion tab for Character AI’s brains.