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

Jason Droege is the CEO of Scale AI, a company that provides foundational training data to every major AI lab. He previously co-founded Scour with Travis Kalanick and built Uber Eats from idea to $20 billion in revenue. In this conversation, Jason shares lessons from getting sued for $250 billion, discovering restaurant economics by weighing sandwich ingredients, and over 25 years of launching transformative technology businesses.What you’ll learn:What actually happened with Meta’s $14 billion investment in Scale AIWhy AI models still need human experts to improve, and how that relationship is evolvingHow AI models learn from experts building websites and debugging codeThe business lessons from building Uber Eats from zero to $20 billionWhy most enterprise data is useless for AI models todayWhy urgent daily problems beat super-valuable occasional problems when building productsHow to think independently when building new products and businesses—Brought to you by:Merge—The fastest way to ship 220+ integrations: http://merge.dev/lennyFigma Make—A prompt-to-code tool for making ideas real: https://www.figma.com/lenny/Mercury—The art of simplified finances: https://mercury.com/—Transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/first-interview-with-scale-ais-ceo-jason-droege—My biggest takeaways (for paid newsletter subscribers): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/i/174979621/my-biggest-takeaways-from-this-conversation—Where to find Jason Droege:• X: https://x.com/jdroege• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasondroege/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Jason Droege(06:01) Jason’s early career and lessons learned(10:27) The current state of Scale AI(12:37) The shift to expert data labeling(17:02) Challenges and strategies in finding experts(18:48) Reinforcement learning and AI environments(28:18) The futu