Scale's new CEO on life after the $14.5 billion Meta deal
My full Sources Live interview with Scale CEO Jason Droege in Davos.
When Alexandr Wang left Scale AI for Meta last year in a $14.5 billion deal, the conventional wisdom was that Scale was done.
Instead, the company posted its best revenue in history last year, reaching a billion-dollar annual run rate and signing more than half of its yearly contracts in a single quarter.
Jason Droege, the company’s new CEO and a former Uber executive, inherited what looks from the outside like an impossible situation: stepping in for one of AI’s most prominent founders while navigating a sudden ownership structure that gave Meta 49% of the company. But the transition revealed something more interesting than another cautionary tale about reverse acquihires. It exposed the widening gap between what AI models can do and what enterprises can actually deploy, and how Scale built two separate businesses to capture both sides of that divide.
Two weeks ago, I sat down with Droege in front of a live audience at Brunswick Home on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Our conversation gets into the mechanics of frontier model data (the stuff that makes models do things they couldn’t do before), why enterprises ask for capabilities two years after model builders do, and what actually happens when you try to deploy AI at Mayo Clinic or the Pentagon, and more.
You can also watch the full interview on YouTube. Stay tuned for more of my Sources Live interviews in Davos. And thanks to Disruptive for making this interview possible.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity:
