Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

A few possibilities:

1. Mark no longer wants to run the company and he is picking alexander wang. 2. Mark believes that Ai is the top priority, his teams have failed, (this is all clearly true so far) and he wants completely change the org structure of his AI efforts (not recommendation but everything else). 3. Mark wants to cut off the supply of information to other labs 4. Mark thinks that full access to ScaleAi's data could accelerate their research and somehow they couldn't do this with a less expensive options.

(2) seems semi-reasonable (in that Meta has failed with near infinite resources) but acquiring a handful of execs for this price seems absurd.

(3) seems like a conspiracy theory and the technology is moving away from this path of data collection, although it is still important at this very moment.

(4) Maybe.

I guess some combination of all 4 is plausible. But the amount of money seems, frankly, absurd.




I wonder if it's really an adjacent benefit to your #4: Mark doesn't just get full access to Scale's data, they also get access to an army of >100,000 data labelers to use however they want.


(5)Retail therapy.

Zuck is depressed as he wants to be liked and the Theo Von interview recently was a disaster.

You and I may buy a new tech toy for $100 to cheer ourselves up, he spent a bit more :-)




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: