By Supantha Mukherjee
June 13, 2025 – 7:06 AM PDT
PARIS (Reuters) – OpenAI plans to continue working with Scale AI after rival Meta (META.O) on Friday agreed to take a 49% stake in the artificial intelligence startup for $14.8 billion, OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar told the VivaTech conference in Paris.
Scale AI provides vast amounts of labelled or curated training data, which is crucial for developing sophisticated tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“We don’t want to ice the ecosystem because acquisitions are going to happen,” she said. “And if we ice each other out, I think we’re actually going to slow the pace of innovation.”
Microsoft (MSFT.O)-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI language models rival those of Meta’s Llama family of models. Scale CEO Alexandr Wang will now join Meta to lead its new superintelligence unit.
“We don’t just buy from Scale, Friar said. “We work with many vendors on the data front.”
“As models have gotten smarter, you’re going into a place where you need real expertise … we have academics and experts telling us that they are finding novel things in their space.”
Sophisticated updates to AI models in the fiercely competitive arena are now demanding a rapidly expanding network of human trainers who have specialized knowledge – from historians to scientists, some with doctorate degrees.
Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Paris, Editing by Louise Heavens