Meta sacrifices a heap of money at the altar of AI

Mark Zuckerberg announced in April that the company would make huge capital expenditures in the coming year to keep up in the race to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence. He made good on that promise last week with a 15bn "AI superintelligence" team that would feature reported nine-figure salaries and a 49% investment in Scale AI. Before Meta's investment, Scale counted most of the major players in AI among its clients, and some of them were less than thrilled with the development. Bloomberg puts it succinctly: Scale AI's Wang Brings to Meta Knowledge of What Everyone Else is Doing. Google, Scale's largest customer, got scared.