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Scale AI Rivals See Customer Demand Surge After Meta Investment

A growing number of companies now offer data-labeling services that rival Scale AI.

Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg

Takeaways

Alex Ratner was trying to get in a few hours of work after putting his kids to bed when news broke that Meta Platforms Inc. planned to invest billions of dollars in data-labeling startup Scale AI. Within minutes, Ratner, who runs a rival company called Snorkel AI, began fielding calls from his board about the chance to pick up clients worried about Scale’s independence.

Then came the inquiries from possible customers — dozens of them, he said, resulting in “tens of millions of dollars” in potential deals at various stages of completion over the past week. “Every responsible LLM developer is going to be making a lot of moves to diversify their vendor portfolio,” Ratner said, using an acronym for large language models. “There will be some major shifts and major openings.”