. Former Amazon consumer boss Jeff Wilke, one of Wang’s most trusted advisors, takes an even more enthusiastic view: Scale could become the Amazon Web Services of AI.
They’re also, increasingly, an ethical concern, with worries emerging about substandard working conditions and low pay. Meanwhile, competitors see Scale as a house of cards that has suffered layoffs and declining value on secondary markets in the past year that has stripped Wang of billionaire status. “Scale markets itself as a technology company,” says Manu Sharma, cofounder of rival startup. “For us, they’re no different than any business-process outsourcing company.
The AV wager was becoming a cash cow. Scale’s client list now included major international auto manufacturers such as Toyota and Honda, as well as Silicon Valley behemoths like Google AV subsidiary Waymo, according to a June 2019 fundraising pitch deck seen byAn account with Apple’s secretive self-driving unit alone was bringing in more than $10 million, the document said, putting annual revenue on track to surpass $40 million.
Beyond the ethical considerations, there are business questions, too. What Scale is doing with Remotasks isn’t hard to replicate. Kevin Guo, cofounder of Hive, a startup that once fielded its own Remotasks rival before shuttering it due to tough margins, contends that the sort of data labeling Scale does is a commodity business. “Anyone who puts up a team can compete with you, and it comes down to price really quickly,” he says.
The lion’s share of government spending on AI is still going to the likes of Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, not Silicon Valley upstarts.