Inside Scale AI’s New Robot Labs

After Meta Platforms bought nearly half of the data labelling startup Scale AI and hired its co-founder Alexandr Wang and other key employees, Scale’s future looked uncertain. Even more so after the nine-year old startup laid off 200 employees and customer OpenAI wound down its work with the company.

Now, we’re getting a sense of how Scale’s business could evolve in the coming years. It’s continuing to develop AI applications and to hire contractors to provide data for language models. More recently it’s expanded in a new field: collecting data to help robotics companies train their AI models. 

Over the last few months, Scale has hired hundreds of contractors around the world to manipulate robotic arms and record point-of-view style videos of themselves completing various tasks. It then sells the data from those demonstrations to startups like Generalist AI and Collaborative Robotics that are training AI models to power robots. Scale’s contractors also label data that its robotics customers such as Physical Intelligence have collected themselves.