They are grifters taking advantage of boom and recruiting industry execs to head sales. They don't have any proprietary technology. The fact that private info was leaked in a fb channel by annotators in like south america shows that this company has little in the way of a meaningful product.

The irony is in their name "scale", laying off 20% would be ringing death bell for a company that actually operated leanly. They basically tried to copy mechanical turk

I also am a bit surprised by this. AI is back to being the hotness now that crypto blew itself up. I suspect from reading this quote:

"Many of the industries we serve, such as e-commerce and consumer technology, have been buoyed by the pandemic and are now experiencing a painful market correction."

that they had an established segment of customers that were experimentally looking at ML to augment their core business, and how they could leverage with their data. Perhaps these companies are pulling back spend with whispers of a shaky 2023 economy.

I interviewed with them recently, they've brought on lots of (expensive) new MLE type employees to provide ML SaaS services. Open-source might be putting pressure on them as these things become more commoditized

When it seems like everybody else is doing layoffs, MBAs and wall street gets nervous if you don't do it