Scale AI Exec Says AI Foundational Labs Are Like Film Studios

One exec is evaluating the enterprise mannequin of corporations like OpenAI and Meta AI to Marvel Studios.

On an episode of the “a16z Podcast” printed on Tuesday, Scale AI’s head of product for enterprise purposes, Ben Scharfstein, mentioned his most controversial opinion on AI is that AI foundational corporations are extra like content material studios than software program corporations.

“My hottest take is I feel the appropriate manner to consider basis labs is that they are like film studios,” he mentioned. “What I imply by that’s they make investments a ton of cash in blockbusters which have a comparatively quick time span to pay them again.”

Scharfstein heads Scale AI’s enterprise purposes enterprise, which builds and deploys generative AI options for different corporations. Scale AI, which obtained a $14.3 billion funding from Meta in June, is best recognized for its information annotation enterprise, which helps Large Tech purchasers like Google and Meta enhance their AI chatbots.

The exec in contrast giant language mannequin corporations to Hollywood studio Marvel, well-known for its blockbuster superhero film franchises.

“Marvel, you are investing in ‘The Avengers’ and also you make investments a billion {dollars} in it after which it perhaps pays you again over the following 18 months,” he mentioned. “It is fairly irrelevant after that.”

Very similar to “The Avengers,” corporations like OpenAI are additionally constructing franchises with GPTs which can be constructed off the earlier fashions, he mentioned.

“It is simply very comparable. You are capable of flip that franchise perhaps right into a online game after which perhaps it’s extra like software program,” he mentioned. “However really proper now the mannequin corporations look extra like a content material studio than they do like a software program firm.”

Scale AI builds its customized generative AI options utilizing fashions together with OpenAI’s GPT-4, Cohere’s Command, and Meta’s Llama 2, in line with its web site. In June, OpenAI mentioned it hit $10 billion in annual recurring income, lower than three years after launching its well-liked ChatGPT chatbot.

ScaleAI additionally depends on these frontier labs and has labored with practically each LLM firm, together with Meta, OpenAI, and Google’s DeepMind for its AI coaching enterprise, in line with an inner shopper dashboard Enterprise Insider reviewed.

Final month, Scale AI decreased its 1,400-person workforce by 14% in cuts that affected 200 workers in its generative AI division.

In an inner electronic mail seen by Enterprise Insider, interim CEO Jason Droege mentioned Scale AI ramped up capability “too shortly over the previous yr” on GenAI, leaving different divisions, like its public sector items, “under-resourced.”

ScaleAI didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.