Scale AI Lays Off 200 Employees: 'We Ramped Up Our GenAI Capacity Too Quickly'

Scale AI is laying off 14% of its workforce and 500 contractors as part of a major restructuring just weeks after Meta bought a 49% stake and absorbed its CEO into a new superintelligence lab. The Verge reports: Jason Droege, CEO of Scale AI, sent an email to all Scale employees today, which was viewed by The Verge. Droege said he plans to restructure several parts of Scale's generative AI business and organize it from 16 pods to 'the five most impactful': code, languages, experts, experimental, and audio. The company will also reorganize its go-to-market team into a single 'demand generation' team that will have four pods, each covering a specific set of customers.

'The reasons for these changes are straightforward: we ramped up our GenAI capacity too quickly over the past year,' Droege wrote. 'While that felt like the right decision at the time, it's clear this approach created inefficiencies and redundancies. We created too many layers, excessive bureaucracy, and unhelpful confusion about the team's mission. Shifts in market demand also required us to re-examine our plans and refine our approach.'

Droege said that he believes the changes to the company will make it more able to adapt to market shifts, serve existing customers, and win back customers that have 'slowed down' work with Scale. He also said that the company would deprioritize generative AI projects with less growth potential. 'We remain a well-resourced, well-funded company,' he wrote. Scale's generative AI business unit will have an all-hands meeting tomorrow, followed by a company-wide meeting on July 18th.

Osborne said that Scale plans to increase investment and hire hundreds of new employees in areas like enterprise, public sector, and international public sector, in the second half of 2025 and that severance has been paid out to impacted roles. 'We're streamlining our data business to help us move faster and deliver even better data solutions to our GenAI customers,' he said.

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