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
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What is Jason Droege’s background and the story behind Scour?
There's been a lot of talk these days about AI not deliver.
On the promise that we hear, especially at enterprises. These things take six to 12 months to get them truly robust enough where an important process can be automated. Like with any of these major tech revolutions, headlines tell one story and then on the ground, laying broadband means you need to dig up every single road in America to lay it. Someone's gotta dig up the road or someone's gotta run the undersea cable. Is there anything you think people don't truly grasp? understand about where AI models are gonna be in the next two, three years. The general trend right now is going from models knowing things to models doing things. The next question becomes, what can it do for me? How does the agent make decisions for you?
Let's talk about scale and this whole world of AI that you're in. You essentially pioneered data labeling, trading data.
Creating evals for labs. 18 months ago, you would get a short story and it would say, Is this short story better than this short story? And now you're at a point where one task is building an entire website by one of the world's best web developers, or it is explaining some very nuanced topic on cancer to a model. These tasks now take hours of time and they require PhDs and professionals. I've talked to a bunch of people that work with you over the years, and I heard a lot about Just how high of a bar you set for new businesses. From an entrepreneurship standpoint, it truly is about what insight do I have? Why am I so lucky to have this insight? Why in a world of a million entrepreneurs who are thinking, who are smart, who are trying everything, why am I in the position where I likely have an insight that others do not?
Today, my guest is Jason Drogi. Jason is the new CEO of Scale AI. This is the first interview that he's done since taking over for Alex Wing after the meta deal. Alex now leads the super intelligence team at Meta. Prior to Scale, Jason co-founded a company with Travis Kalinick before he started Uber, worked at a couple startups. Most famously, Jason launched and led Uber Eats, which went from an idea that he and his team. Had to what is now a multi billion dollar run rate business, and one that basically saved Uber during the pandemic when nobody was taking rides. This interview is following a theme that I've been following through a bunch of interviews, which is the evolution of how AI models actually get smarter.
Along with scaling compute and improving the actual model code, much of the improvements we're seeing in ChatGPT and Claude and every frontier area. Model is these labs hiring experts to fill in gaps in their knowledge and correcting their understanding of how things work and basically showing them what good looks like in every domain that consumers are using models. Scale was the pioneer in this space. They created the category. And in our conversation, we talk about what is happening at scale and just how this deal with Meta worked, what experts like doctors and software engineers are. specifically doing to help models get smarter, how the whole market of data labeling and evals and data training has changed from when scale entered the market to today, and also just how long will we need humans to keep helping AI get smarter.
We also get into where Jason sees models going in the next few years because they have such a unique glimpse into the future. We also talk about a ton of really unique and really important product lessons from the course of Jason's career. Including a bunch of advice on how to start a new business, both startups and within existing companies, and also a bunch of advice on hiring and leadership and so much more. A huge thank you to Alan Penn and Stephen Chow for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year-free
15 incredible products, including Lovable, Replit, Bolt, N8, and Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chap ERD, and Mobbin.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Jason Droege’s background and the story behind Scour?
0:00–11:17
2
How did the $14 B Meta investment change Scale AI’s ownership and strategy?
11:17–22:31
3
Why are expert data‑labelers and evals now the core of AI model training?
22:31–34:12
4
What are reinforcement‑learning environments and how is Scale building them?
34:12–44:36
5
How did Jason help launch Uber Eats and what lessons did he learn about unit economics?
44:36–55:06
6
What hiring principles does Jason use to build high‑performing teams?
55:06–1:03:15
7
What practical AI tools does Jason use daily to stay ahead of the curve?
1:03:15–1:13:53
8
What are the final takeaways and lightning‑round insights from the interview?
1:13:53–1:23:57
Speakers
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