JULY 16, 2025 — 214 EMPLOYEES
The company has announced a 14% reduction in force after Meta invested $14.3 billion into Scale AI and hired its founder, Alexandr Wang.
The reduction will impact 200 full-time employees.
A company spokesperson noted, "We created too many layers, excessive bureaucracy, and unhelpful confusion about the team's mission. While that felt like the right decision at the time, it's clear this approach created inefficiencies and redundancies. We're streamlining our data business to help us move faster and deliver even better data solutions to our GenAI customers. We also plan to make significant investments and hiring across our enterprise and government AI businesses. I want to extend our deepest gratitude for their valuable contributions and dedication to our company.”
SEPTEMBER 2, 2024 — 1,300 CONTRACT EMPLOYEES GONE
According to published reports, approximately 1,300 contract employees working for Scale AI in tagging and labeling data, such as images, video, and text, to train AI models, were laid off by the company’s labor contractor in late August 2024.
The company’s contractor, HireArt sent an email to the targeted employees. “Today, August 26th, your employment with HireArt will be coming to an end, effective immediately; you no longer need to report to work. Your final pay will be issued by the end of the day on August 30th for your hours worked."
Since the workers were not Scale AI employees, there was little or no official reporting as they worked for two of Scale's subsidiaries, Outlier AI and Remotasks.
According to a Scale spokesperson, "Due to a shift in business strategy, Scale reduced its remote contractor headcount. These contractors were employed by HireArt and assigned to project-based work with Scale. This reduction was not a layoff and does not impact full-time Scale employees. Through HireArt, impacted contractors were given severance and offered COBRA coverage through the end of the month."
FEBRUARY 1, 2023 — Original post…
San Francisco, California-based Scale AI, an artificial intelligence company making tools for collecting, formatting, and validating training data for artificial intelligence applications, has announced it has laid off 20% of its workforce and embarked on other cost-cutting measures including reassessing the company's real estate footprint and curbing future hiring.
The reduction in force impacted 140 employees.
Founder and CEO Alexandr Wang noted that the layoffs were the result of optimistic future projections.
“As a result, I made the decision to grow the team aggressively in order to take advantage of what I thought was our new normal. For a time, this seemed to prove out — we saw strong sales growth through 2021 and 2022. As a result, we increased headcount assuming the massive growth would continue. However, the macro environment has changed dramatically in recent quarters, which is something I failed to predict. Many of the industries we serve, such as e-commerce and consumer technology, have been buoyed by the pandemic and are now experiencing a painful market correction. As a result, we need to prepare ourselves for a very different economic environment.”
Change is coming. There will always be a tomorrow, no matter how much you may try to ignore it. There are no guarantees in life or promises for a bright future. We see good people being laid off through no fault of their own. Just because something bad hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't. It can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere. No one is guaranteed to wake up tomorrow and still have a job by evening. Are you now wondering, Am I Next?
