First interview with Scale AI’s CEO: $14B Meta deal, what’s working in enterprise AI, and what frontier labs are building next | Jason Droege

There's been a lot of talk these days about AI not delivering on the promise that we hear, especially at enterprises. These things take six to twelve months to get them truly robust enough where an important process can be automated. Like with any of these major tech revolutions, headlines tell one story and then on the ground, laying broadband means you need to dig up every single road in America to lay it. Someone's gotta dig up the road or someone's gotta run the undersea cable. Is there anything you think people don't truly grasp or understand about where AI models are gonna be in the next two, three years? The general trend right now is going from models knowing things to models doing things. The next question becomes, what can it do for me? How does the agent make decisions for you? Let's talk about scale and this whole world of AI that you're in. You essentially pioneered data labeling, training data, creating evals for labs. Eighteen months ago, you would get a short story and it would say, is this short story better than this short story? And now you're at a point where one task is building an entire website by one of the world's best web developers, or it is explaining some very nuanced topic on cancer to a model. These tasks now take hours of time, and they require PhDs and professionals. I've talked to a bunch of people that I've worked with you over the years and I heard a lot about just how high of a bar you set for new businesses. From an entrepreneurship standpoint, it truly is about what insight do I have? Why am I so lucky to have this insight? Why in a world of a million entrepreneurs who are thinking, who are smart, who are trying everything, why am I in the position where I likely have an insight that others do not? Today, my guest is Jason Droge. Jason is the new CEO of Scale AI. This is the first interview that he's done since taking over for Alex Wang after the Meta deal. Alex now leads the super intelligence team at Meta. Prior to Scale, Jason co founded a company with Travis Kalanick before he started Uber, worked at a couple startups. Most famously, Jason launched and led Uber Eats, which went from an idea that he and his team had to what is now a multi billion dollar run rate business, and one that basically saved Uber during the pandemic when nobody was taking rides. This interview is following a theme that I've been following through a bunch of interviews, which is the evolution of how AI models actually get smarter. Along with scaling compute and improving the actual model code, much of the improvements we're seeing in JPGPT and Claude and every Frontier AI model is these labs hiring experts to fill in gaps in their knowledge and correcting their understanding of how …