[Beat Beta] Scale AI was accused of labor abuse. Now its founder is Meta’s chief AI officer. – Rappler
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MANILA, Philippines – Founded in 2016 by MIT dropout and subsequent billionaire Alexandr Wang in 2016, Scale AI quickly became a Silicon Valley unicorn, filling a need for the then-emerging AI industry: data labeling.
AI systems need actual humans to clean up the data that goes into them. In the simplest terms, a photo of a cat needs to be labeled as a cat for the AI system to identify it as a cat. Scale AI recognized that need, and turned it into a multibillion-dollar business.
But there was a human cost to all of it. In 2023, The Washington Post reported how low-paid gig workers, specifically in the Philippines, toiled to “train” these AI systems at below minimum wage, often with no recourse to file grievances in cases where they were not paid at all.
Scale AI has become a high-profile data labeling company, but it isn’t alone in an industry that has been accused of exploiting labor in so-called “digital sweatshops” not just in the Philippines but in Kenya, India, Pakistan, Venezuela, and Colombia as an article in The Conversation enumerated.
In the US itself, Scale AI faced a litany of legal challenges surrounding alleged unlawful layoffs, wage theft, and failure to protect workers from content trauma. The US Department of Labor began investigations in 2024 but suspended these in May 2025, with no clear reasons reported.
Despite these, Meta later acquired a 49% stake in Scale, and made its founder and former CEO Wang as its first-ever chief AI officer. With Wang’s focus on speed and growth more than a human-centric approach in AI development, it’ll be crucial to pay attention to how the 28-year-old proceeds to develop future AI systems for one of the world’s most influential — and even more controversial — companies, Meta.
Watch our video for more. – Rappler.com
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