Meta buys Scale AI in a $14.3B deal

cnbc.com

21 points·nsoonhui··8 comments

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44268197.

Moving to a later submission of a paywalled article maybe isn't the best direction.

For fairness I went with the first submitter of the topic but they submitted so early (12 hours ago) that I had to create a new copy of the post. The NYT story seemed best report and has a paywall workaround but if someone can recommend a different article as being better we’ll consider changing it.

> had to create a new copy of the post

ahhh, tricky.

title is not accurate:

> Meta is pumping $14.3 billion into Scale AI as part of the deal, and will have a 49% stake in the artificial intelligence startup, but will not have any voting power, a Scale AI spokesperson said.

I'm also skeptical that leadership is the issue here. From my experience Meta's culture is too cut throat and a certain level of boredom is required for breakthroughs in an ambiguous space. It's not like you can just swing the proverbial whip and come out with some AI breakthrough. They're not making widgets.

That being said, Meta did have two home runs in the form of Instagram and WhatsApp, so who knows... (Oculus is yet to be seen).

Title is very accurate.

Meta bought Scale for 14.3 Billion. This is the the new way companies like Google, MS, Meta buy other companies to avoid anti-trust scrutiny. They invest huge amounts of cash and then the CEO comes to work for them. Anti Trust law is circumvented and the competition gets gobble up.

Matt Levine suggested that this was an aquihire. And the weird setup where they only buy non voting shares is to not trigger any regulatory review

Below article has interesting info but it's paywalled. Does anyone have a way to read this?

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/fame-feud-and-fortun...

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