In an industry famed for moving fast and breaking things, it's odd to hear of anyone slowing down. But just a few weeks on from Meta investing $14.3 billion in data annotation firm, Scale AI, it's laying off over 200 staff and 500 of its global contractors, The Verge reports. Although this may amount to classic efficiency savings when two large firms merge their efforts, the CEO claims that it's because "we ramped up our GenAI capacity too quickly over the past year."
Meta announced its pivot towards developing "superintelligence" AI at the start of June, alongside talk of enormous signing bonuses to attract OpenAI employees, and news of a $14 billion investment in Scale AI. That gave Meta a 49% stake in the business, and the attention and time of its then CEO, Alexander Wang, who has since joined Meta. But even with all that investment, Scale AI is looking to cut back on a sizeable number of its employees.
