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Scale AI , which provides data - labeling services to companies that want to train simple machine encyclopedism models , has raise a $ 1 billion Series F turn from bad - name institutional and corporate investors that include Amazon and Meta .
The fundraise is a mixture of primary and subaltern funding , and is the a la mode in a slew of big venture Das Kapital investment in AI . Amazon recentlyclosed a $ 4 billion investiture in OpenAI rival Anthropic , andthe likes of Mistral AIand Perplexityare also in the processof raising more billion - clam rounds at elevated valuations .
Before this round , Scale AI had raised around $ 600 million in its eight - year story , including a $ 325 million Series E in 2021 thatvalued it at around $ 7 billion — double the evaluation of itsSeries D in 2020 . Three years on , and despite headwinds thatcaused it to lay off 20 % of its faculty last twelvemonth , Scale AI is now treasure at $ 13.8 billion — a sign of the times , as investor shinny to get ahead in the AI gold rush .
The Series F was run by Accel , which also lead the troupe ’s Series A and enter in subsequent venture round .
away from Amazon and Meta , Scale AI has pull an assortment of newfangled investor : The speculation arms of Cisco , Intel , AMD and ServiceNow participate , as did DFJ Growth , WCM and investor Elad Gil . Many of its existing investors also return : Nvidia , Coatue , Y Combinator , Index Ventures , Founders Fund , Tiger Global Management , Thrive Capital , Spark Capital , Greenoaks , Wellington Management and former GitHub CEO , Nat Friedman .
Banking on the growing importance of data
Data is the lifeblood of hokey intelligence , which is why companies specializing in datum direction and processing are faring well right now . Just last calendar week , Wekasaid it raised $ 140 millionat a $ 1.6 billion post - money rating to serve companies build up data line for their AI applications .
Founded in 2016 , Scale AI engage car learn with “ human - in - the - loop topology ” oversight to manage and annotate gravid volumes of data point , which is vital for training AI systems across industries such as self-governing vehicles .
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But most information is unstructured , and AI system find it hard to apply such data off the at-bat . It needs to be labeled , which is a imagination - intensive attempt , specially with with child datasets . Scale AI provide companies with data that has been aright annotated and prim for training models . It also specializes for different industries with different indigence — a self - driving car company will in all probability require labeled data point from cameras and lidar , whereas rude language processing ( NLP ) use shell will need annotated school text .
The company ’s customers let in Microsoft , Toyota , GM , Meta , the U.S. Department of Defense and , as of last August , ChatGPT - maker OpenAI , which is tapping Scale AI to lease company fine - tune its GPT-3.5 text edition - mother models .
Scale AI says it will use the unexampled hard cash to help speed up the “ abundance of frontier datum that will pave our road to artificial general intelligence . ”
“ Data copiousness is not the nonremittal — it ’s a selection , ” Scale AI ’s CEO and conscientious objector - founder , Alexandr Wang , said in apress release . “ It call for bringing together the best idea in engineering , operations , and AI . Our vision is one of information abundance , where we have the mean value of production to continue scale frontier LLMs many more rules of order of magnitude . We should not be data point - constrained in getting to GPT-10 . ”
