Scale AI announces major layoffs amid restructuring
Scale AI, the company behind tons of data used to train AI models, just laid off about 200 employees and 500 contractors—nearly 14% of its team.
This shakeup comes right after Meta bought a huge 49% stake in Scale for $14.3 billion and tapped former CEO Alexandr Wang to head its new Superintelligence group.
Why the layoffs happened
CEO Jason Droege says Scale grew its generative AI teams way too fast, leading to overlap and inefficiency.
Now they're reorganizing—shrinking from 16 specialized pods down to five focused teams (think: code, languages, experts, experimental, audio) and combining sales efforts into one squad sorted by customer type.
The goal? Stay nimble and ready for what's next in AI.
Scale plans to start hiring again
Even with these layoffs, Scale isn't slowing down for long—they plan to start hiring again in their Enterprise and Public Sector divisions by late 2025.
Scale AI's human annotators
While it's all about high-tech AI on the surface, much of Scale's secret sauce is actually people—thousands of human annotators around the world label data so today's smartest AIs can learn from it.