Scale AI

Hayden Field

@haydenfield

Scale AI has a new CEO: the current COO of Google Cloud. Francis deSouza will take over from interim CEO who has been leading since Alex Wang joined Meta. Scale's new focus on building AI applications for enterprises/govs is leading to $1B+ in 2026 revenue projections, per spox.

Anish Moonka

@anishmoonka

Yesterday Meta told every US employee their computer will now record mouse clicks, keystrokes, and screenshots while they work. All of it goes into training an AI to do their job. In 30 days, 8,000 of these same employees are being laid off. Reuters got the memo. The wording is the company's own: the recordings will be used to build "AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously." Reuters also confirmed the May 20 date and the number, 8,000 people, exactly 10% of Meta's global workforce. Meta is spending $115 to $135 billion on AI infrastructure this year, almost double the $72 billion it spent last year. The entire business only generated $115.8 billion in cash for all of 2025. Meta is now planning to spend more on AI in 2026 than the whole company brings in. Part of the bill went to a company called Scale AI. Meta paid $14.3 billion for 49% of it last June, mostly to bring in CEO Alexandr Wang. Scale's whole job is to tag and clean the human-written data that AI models learn from. Meta wanted Wang because their old data supply ran dry. The public internet is almost out of fresh material to feed these models. A group called Epoch AI ran the math and projects the world will burn through its supply of high-quality human-written text on the web somewhere between 2026 and 2032. The industry calls this the "data wall." Google and OpenAI are stuck on the same side of it. So Meta turned inward, to the most expensive training material money can buy: their own employees doing their own jobs. Mouse movements teach the AI how to move around a screen, click by click. Keystroke logs hand it the exact shortcuts and rhythm an experienced worker uses, the muscle memory of the job. Screenshots show what a finished task should look like. The people being recorded in April are the raw material for the AI that replaces them in May. This is not just a Meta thing. Amazon laid off 16,000 corporate workers in January. Oracle let go of up to 30,000 of its people, about 18% of the company, on March 31. The cash they saved goes toward $156 billion in AI data centers. The whole pattern across big tech is identical. Record profits and record AI spending, paired with the biggest workforce cuts since the pandemic. The thing they are building is a software worker that opens the dashboard, reads the numbers, drafts the email, books the meeting, and never needs a coffee break. The training data for that worker is a senior Meta employee doing all of that, on Meta's payroll, one month before their last day.

Bilal Zuberi // Red Glass Ventures

@bznotes

Congrats @fdesouza on taking over as new CEO of @scale_AI. 🚀🚀🚀

Francis deSouza

@fdesouza

Big News: I’m joining @scale_AI as CEO, starting August 10. Scale sits at a rare intersection, working with the top AI labs to push the frontier while helping enterprises and governments actually deploy AI they can verify and trust. I’m excited to lead a company with a mission to develop reliable AI systems for the most important decisions. More to come.

Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

Just learned: Software engineers used to do manual data labeling at Scale AI while Alex Wang was CEO. After he left, new leadership joined, and were HORRIFIED to learn this. Stopped it ASAP Now at Meta, software engineers are assigned manual data labeling... see the pattern?

Mouad

@nadzi_mouad

Okay so I need to talk about what’s happening with Yann LeCun because this is genuinely one of the wildest exits I’ve ever seen in tech. For those who don’t know—LeCun is one of the “godfathers of AI.” Not a marketing title. The man literally won the Turing Award (basically the Nobel Prize of computer science) for helping invent deep learning. He’s been at Meta for over a decade as their Chief AI Scientist. An absolute legend. So here’s what happened. Zuckerberg got frustrated. Llama wasn’t moving fast enough. The AI race was heating up and Meta felt like it was falling behind. So what does Zuck do? He drops $14 BILLION on Scale AI and hires its 28-year-old co-founder, Alexandr Wang, to run a brand new “Superintelligence Lab.” And then—and this is the part that still blows my mind—he makes Wang… LeCun’s boss. Think about that for a second. A 65-year-old Turing Award winner. Four decades of groundbreaking research. The guy who helped BUILD this entire field. Now reporting to someone whose company… labels data. (Scale AI is impressive, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t actually build AI models. They annotate training data for other companies.) LeCun just did an interview with the Financial Times and honestly? He chose violence. Called Wang “young” and “inexperienced.” Said he has “no experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher.” And then dropped this absolute gem: “You don’t tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.” I mean. The man said what he said. But wait—it gets better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it. LeCun straight up confirmed that Meta’s team “fudged” the Llama 4 benchmark results. Like, actually manipulated them. Used different models on different tests to make the numbers look better. Remember when everyone was suspicious about those benchmarks back in April? Yeah. Turns out they were right to be. Apparently Zuckerberg was furious when this came out internally. LeCun says he “lost confidence in everyone who was involved” and basically sidelined the entire GenAI team. And here’s the thing that really gets me—LeCun has been saying for YEARS that LLMs are a “dead end.” That you can’t get to real intelligence just by predicting the next word. That we need “world models” that actually understand physical reality, not just language patterns. Everyone at Meta wanted him to stop saying this publicly. Bad for the narrative, you know? But LeCun refused. His exact words: “I’m not gonna change my mind because some dude thinks I’m wrong. I’m not wrong.” That’s not arrogance. That’s a scientist who’s seen enough hype cycles to know when something doesn’t add up. So now he’s out. Launching his own company called AMI Labs—Advanced Machine Intelligence. They’re targeting a $3 billion valuation. Building those world models he’s been talking about. Says he’ll have a “baby version” ready within a year. Oh, and apparently French President Macron personally texted him after the news dropped. LeCun won’t say what the message said but like… the man is getting DMs from heads of state now. I don’t know if LeCun is right about everything. Maybe LLMs will surprise us. Maybe Meta will figure it out. But when one of the three people who literally invented modern AI walks out the door saying your entire strategy is fundamentally flawed? I don’t know man. I’d at least ask some questions. The AI wars just got very, very interesting

Alexandr Wang

Co-founder (former CEO; now Meta Chief AI Officer)

Co-founded Scale AI in 2016; became the world's youngest self-made billionaire and now leads Meta's Superintelligence Labs.

Lucy Guo

Co-founder

Co-founded Scale AI in 2016 and later founded creator-monetization platform Passes.

Jason Droege

Chief Executive Officer

Former Uber Eats executive and Scale's chief strategy officer; became CEO after Wang's departure to Meta.

Previously at Adaptavist · London, England, United Kingdom

Joined May 2026

Camila Sandoval

Field Marketing & Events, Enterprise

Previously at IBM · New York, New York, United States

Joined May 2026

Andy Chin

Machine Learning Research Engineer

Previously at Skygentic - Wingman AI · San Jose, California, United States

Joined May 2026

Margarita R. Ochoa-Maya

Active Member, Healthcare AI Forum – Scale AI

Previously at THYROSCOPE INC. · United States

Joined May 2026