Adam Levy, The Motley Fool

Sun, Jun 22, 2025, 7:05 AM5 min read

• Meta Platforms added $14.3 billion to its investment in Scale AI, adding key personnel to its payroll.

• After a disappointing Llama 4 release, Meta is playing catch-up with the leading AI companies.

• AI has more potential to add value at Meta than almost any other company in the world.

• 10 stocks we like better than Meta Platforms ›

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) is shaking up its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts and the industry as a whole. Earlier this month, it invested a total of $14.3 billion in Scale AI to take a 49% non-voting stake in the company and bring key personnel into Meta's laboratories. Despite the significant changes this brings to Meta and the industry, it's not what makes the stock a buy today.

Artificial intelligence is extremely important to the future of Meta Platforms, and the potential impact of the technology still seems to be underappreciated by the market. Meta's stock price is attractive, and it would be a buy whether it made the move to invest in Scale AI or not.

Scale AI provides curated and labeled data sets to frontier model developers for AI training. It can also provide evaluation and help improve reasoning models with the help of human experts. It works with many of the biggest names in artificial intelligence, providing key services to ensure they can put out the best products.

Meta's investment includes a commercial agreement to spend $450 million per year on Scale's platform. Meta will likely gain access to proprietary data sets in an industry where good data has become incredibly important. More importantly, though, it brings Scale's founder and CEO Alexandr Wang onto Meta's payroll, where he'll head up a new AI "superintelligence" lab.

Meta has struggled to attract top talent to its AI labs, and the disappointing results of its latest Llama AI model release have made the talent gap more clear. It reportedly offered huge incentive packages to poach OpenAI employees in an effort to win over talent to catch back up with the competition, but most rejected it. With its investment in Scale, Meta is hoping it can correct that issue.

Building a leading-edge model is important for Meta, even though it provides its Llama models to the open-source community, albeit with restrictions for commercial use. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is more interested in the potential the most advanced AI systems could bring to Meta's existing products instead of making a product out of the AI model itself. But to build the best model with the most capabilities, it needs wide adoption from the developer community, and that won't happen if its performance is subpar.