Scale AI is an American company founded in 2016 that provides the human-labeled data, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and model evaluations that many AI developers rely on. Its work spans three areas: data services (annotations and RLHF used to train advanced models), evaluations (rigorous testing and red-teaming to benchmark model performance), and applied AI systems for enterprises and governments. Customers have included major AI labs and technology companies.
The company became one of the most visible suppliers in the AI supply chain because frontier models depend heavily on carefully curated and human-rated data, not just raw web text. In 2025, Meta took a large investment stake in Scale AI and its co-founder Alexandr Wang joined Meta to help lead its superintelligence efforts, a deal that underscored how strategically important high-quality data pipelines had become.
Why business readers should care: The quality of an AI model depends as much on its training and evaluation data as on its architecture, and Scale AI is one of the largest companies built around supplying that data. Its prominence shows that “who labels and rates the data” is now a competitive question, not a back-office one.