Why did Meta invest in Scale AI – and how will it change the AI models you use?

Meta’s move to take a significant stake in Scale AI isn’t just another strategic investment. It’s an admission: human data is the critical infrastructure needed to build better AI, faster.

For years, model architecture and compute have dominated the conversation. But we’re entering a new era, one where the differentiator isn’t how novel your transformer is, but how well your model reflects and responds to real human experience. That demands high-quality, diverse, and continuous human input throughout the development lifecycle.

A vote of confidence in human data

Scale’s primary service—labelling data outputs using human annotators—has long been essential to AI. But it hasn’t always been glamorous. Data preparation was often seen as a backroom task, while shiny model architectures stole the limelight.