Date received:
September 24, 2024
Subject:
The $14 Billion Company Doing AI’s Dirty Work
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Location:
New York, NY
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In this edition: Making AI unsexy, rebooting Amazon AI, and a new Hollywood partnership.How Scale AI’s Army Makes AI Function
By Berber Jin
Every day, gig workers across the world type out stories, label images and craft sentences to teach chatbots how to sound more like humans. They work for Scale AI, a startup worth $14 billion that does the dirty work needed for most of the world’s most popular AI models to operate.
As magical as the latest AI models may seem, it turns out they need a good deal of human help in order to sound intelligent and avoid making potentially disastrous mistakes. That’s why Google, Meta and OpenAI have used ScaleAI’s service and why its CEO Alexandr Wang is a billionaire at age 27. Wang likens his company’s importance in the AI revolution to Nvidia, which builds the chips on which the industry relies.
Scale is growing fast, but managing its sprawling network of contractors is no easy task. Workers often quit over gig-work wages and a frequently buggy payments platform. They also sometimes cheat the system by using AI themselves – which caused Scale to almost lose a key contract with Meta last year. Wang himself calls the business “mundane and unsexy,” and is looking for ways to turn his startup into something more like a tech company.
WSJ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
Chip Giants Discuss Middle East Megafactories
Two of the world’s biggest makers of the chips that power AI, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and Samsung Electronics, have discussed building huge factories in the United Arab Emirates. If the talks come to fruition, the Middle East could become a new hub for the production of the pricey, complex chips needed to make AI work.
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The Man Rebooting Amazon’s AI Strategy
PHOTO: BRUNO de CARVALHO/ZUMA PRESS
Amazon may have a hugely successful cloud business that many AI companies use, but when it comes to developing its own AI technology, it lags competitors like Google and Microsoft. The man tasked with helping it catch up is Rohit Prasad, formerly one of the chief architects of Alexa. Read more about why Amazon has struggled in the AI business and how Prasad is trying to fix things.
What the Humans are Saying
“You wouldn’t go in a plane that has a 10% probability of killing everyone, but that’s what we’re doing.”
— Yoshua Bengio, computer scientist and one of the pioneers of modern AI, warning about the risks of the technology in a WSJ video interview.
The AI Forecast
Autonomous robots, AI assistants and agents, “empathy bots” for our kids…these are some of the predictions from experts the WSJ polled about what AI will look like in 2030.
AI in the Wild
Who needs to read an iPhone review when you can talk to an iPhone reviewer? Sort of. Meet Joannabot, our generative-AI tool trained on a decade of reviews and notes on the iPhone 16 from WSJ Senior Personal Technology Columnist Joanna Stern.
Other Highlights From the Week in AI
Lions Gate Entertainment, the studio behind “John Wick” and “The Hunger Games,” has agreed to give AI startup Runway access to its content library in exchange for a custom AI model for use in editing and production. (Listen to podcast.)
T-Mobile is partnering with OpenAI to build a customer service AI platform with user data from the cellular provider’s T-Life app.
Companies including Meta, Spotify and Prada – yes, that Prada – signed an open letter to European Union officials arguing their regulations are squelching AI development on the continent.
Is AI improving job recruiting or ruining it? WSJ readers share their thoughts.
Can AI help prevent loneliness? This writer thinks so.
About Us
WSJ AI & Business is a weekly look at AI’s transformation of the business world. This newsletter was curated and edited by AI Editor Ben Fritz. Reach him at ben.fritz@wsj.com, or reply to any newsletter.
