The way I read Meta's acquisition of Scale AI as they summarize it is insane. They acquired it and wiped out a 1.4B business because none of the customers (all the other labs) wanted Meta to be their data provider.

I lack words to describe that.

Or it's to eliminate a potential market threat before it comes to fruition. Also a very common corpo play.

winteryeti

In the past, a big tech company might buy a struggling startup just to get its engineers (an acqui-hire). This claims we might see the rise of "acqui-data" or "acqui-environment" deal. The value is in the intellectual property of the code itself, which can be used to generate synthetic training data indefinitely.