Meta is paying $14.3 billion to buy 49-percent of Scale AI and hire its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to reboot its troubled AI efforts.

As part of the deal, Wang will report directly to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company announced on Thursday. He will lead a new AI lab inside Meta tasked with building “superintelligence” and remain on Scale’s board of directors. “We will share more about this effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks,” Meta spokesperson Ashley Zandy said in a statement.

For the past several weeks, Zuckerberg has been actively recruiting a new team of researchers from rival firms to work for Wang’s new team, according to people familiar with the matter and other press reports. Zuckerberg has reached out to would-be recruits directly — usually via a cold email or WhatsApp message — and lured some of them from companies like Google with seven and eight-figure compensation packages.

Scale works with Google, OpenAI, and others to help train their models by having humans annotate and label the data that feeds them. Most of that work is done through low-cost labor outside of the US, and it has become a critical component of AI development.

Since the disappointing debut of Llama 4 earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been eager to catch up with competitors like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek. Llama 4’s release was delayed multiple times, and then Meta was caught gaming a public leaderboard to make the model appear better than it actually was. The company has still not released Llama 4 Behemoth, its largest and most expensive version that was teased in April.

Last month, Zuckerberg said that two of Meta’s top priorities for 2025 are making its ChatGPT rival, Meta AI, “the leading personal AI” and “building full general intelligence.” He recently stated that Meta AI has reached one billion monthly users, although the prominence of the assistant across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook heavily influences this number.

This story is developing…