Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Meta plans to invest about $15bn in data-labelling start-up Scale AI and hire the group’s co-founder and top researchers, in one of the biggest deals of its kind as the Big Tech company seeks to catch up with rivals.

The deal, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, would give Meta a 49 per cent stake in Scale AI and value the start-up at roughly $28bn, according to people with knowledge of the matter. It would mark the second consecutive year that Scale AI has doubled its valuation.

The investment in Scale AI and attempt to poach its top talent was part of Meta’s plan to build a “superintelligence” lab that would outperform OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, which are also developing models they claim will exceed human intelligence, according to one of the people.

Scale AI declined to comment, and Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

The launch of Meta’s latest large language model, Llama 4, underwhelmed critics after it underperformed on independent reasoning and coding benchmarks.

Meanwhile, competitors such as Google, OpenAI and Anthropic have each unveiled a new generation of powerful “reasoning” models, which solve problems by breaking them down step by step. Meta is also facing pressure from open source competitors such as China’s DeepSeek that have built powerful models for a fraction of the cost.

Meta, with a market capitalisation of nearly $2tn, has invested heavily in generative artificial intelligence. But progress has been halting and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has reorganised the efforts multiple times. Meta announced in April the departure of Joelle Pineau, vice-president of AI research.

Alexandr Wang, a 28-year-old paper billionaire who co-founded Scale AI in 2016, is set to join Meta’s “superintelligence” lab, the details of which were first reported by The New York Times. Details of Meta’s investment were first reported by Bloomberg and The Information.

Scale AI’s core business involves manually labelling the data that is used to train advanced AI models to ensure it is accurate.

Wang has forged relationships with Silicon Valley’s biggest investors and technologists, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and has positioned Scale AI to serve companies developing autonomous vehicles and more recently those building generative AI models.

But his talents lie in promoting the company rather than managing its staff or furthering AI research, according to multiple people who have worked with him.

Jason Droege, who joined Scale AI from Uber Eats less than a year ago, was expected to step up from chief strategy officer to chief executive, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The fate of Scale AI’s remaining employees is less clear. Wang recently spoke about his desire to take the start-up public, but the potential deal with Meta casts uncertainty over that goal.

Scale AI had been attempting to broaden its revenue sources following investor concerns about its concentrated services, according to one person with knowledge of the matter. The group has increasingly focused on building custom applications for enterprises and bidding for government contracts.

Last year, Microsoft paid $650mn to hire Inflection boss Mustafa Suleyman and his top lieutenants, and to license the start-up’s technology. Google also paid $2.7bn for a similar arrangement with Character AI.

The bespoke structures used by the Big Tech groups were partly designed to avoid probes from regulators, according to people with knowledge of the deals. But Google and Microsoft have nonetheless faced scrutiny from antitrust enforcers.

Additional reporting by Hannah Murphy

Since protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles began, false and misleading claims about the ongoing demonstrations have spread on text-based social networks. Outright lies posted directly to social media mixed with misinformation spread through established channels by the White House as Donald Trump dramatically escalated federal intervention. The stream of undifferentiated real and fake information has painted a picture of the city that forks from reality.

Parts of Los Angeles have seen major protests over the past four days against intensified immigration raids by the US president’s administration. On Saturday, dramatic photos from downtown Los Angeles showed cars set aflame amid confrontations with law enforcement. Many posts promoted the perception that mayhem and violence had overtaken the entirety of Los Angeles, even though confrontations with law enforcement and vandalism remained confined to a small part of the sprawling city. Trump has deployed 2,000 members of the national guard to the city without requesting consent from California’s governor Gavin Newsom, which provoked the state to sue for an alleged violation of sovereignty. The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has also ordered the US military to deploy approximately 700 Marines to the city.

Amid the street-level and legal conflicts, misinformation is proliferating. Though lies have long played a part in civil and military conflicts, social media often acts as an accelerant, with facts failing to spread as quickly as their counterparts, a dynamic that has played out with the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, a devastating hurricane in North Carolina and the coronavirus pandemic.

Among the most egregious examples were conservative and pro-Russian accounts circulating a video of Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, from before the protests with the claim that she incited and supported the protests, which have featured Mexican flags, according to the misinformation watchdog Newsguard. The misleading posts – made on Twitter/X by conservative commentator Benny Johnson on pro-Trump sites such as WLTReport.com or Russian state-owned sites such as Rg.ru – have received millions of views, according to the organization. Sheinbaum in fact told reporters on 9 June: “We do not agree with violent actions as a form of protest … We call on the Mexican community to act pacifically.”

A post about bricks stirs a mixture of real and fake news

Conspiratorial conservatives are grasping at familiar bogeymen. A post to X on Saturday claiming that “Soros-funded organizations” had dropped off pallets of bricks near Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facilities received more than 9,500 retweets and was viewed more than 800,000 times. Democratic megadonor George Soros appears as a consistent specter in rightwing conspiracy theories, and the post likewise attributed the supply drop to LA mayor, Karen Bass, and California governor, Gavin Newsom.

“It’s Civil War!!” the post read.

The photo of stacked bricks originates from a Malaysian construction supply company, and the hoax about bricks being supplied to protesters has spread repeatedly since the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the US. X users appended a “community note” fact-checking the tweet. X’s native AI chatbot, Grok, also provided fact-checks when prompted to evaluate the veracity of the post.

In response to the hoax photo, some X users replied with links to real footage from the protests that showed protesters hammering at concrete bollards, mixing false and true and reducing clarity around what was happening in reality. The independent journalist who posted the footage claimed the protesters were using the material as projectiles against police, though the footage did not show such actions.

The Social Media Lab, a research unit out of Toronto Metropolitan University, posted on Bluesky: “These days, it feels like every time there’s a protest, the old clickbaity ‘pallets of bricks’ hoax shows up right on cue. You know the one, photos or videos of bricks supposedly left out to encourage rioting. It’s catnip for right-wing agitators and grifters.”

Trump and the White House muddy the waters

Trump himself has fed the narrative that the protests are inauthentic and larger than they really are, fueled by outside agitators without legitimate interest in local matters.

“These are not protesters, they are troublemakers and insurrectionists,” Trump posted to Truth Social, which was screenshotted and reposted to X by Elon Musk. Others in the administration have made similar points on social media.

A reporter for the Los Angeles Times pointed out that the White House put out a statement about a particular Mexican national being arrested for allegedly assaulting an officer “during the riots”. In fact, Customs and Border Protection agents stopped him before the protests began.

Sowing misleading information, reaping distrust

Trump has increased the number of Ice raids across the country, which has stoked fears of deportations across Los Angeles, heavily populated with immigrants to the US. Per the Social Media Lab, anti-Ice posts also spread misinformation. One post on Bluesky, marked “Breaking”, claimed that federal agents had just arrived at an LA elementary school and tried to question first graders. In fact, the event occurred two months ago. Researchers called the post “rage-farming to push merch”.

The conspiratorial website InfoWars put out a broadcast on X titled: Watch Live: LA ICE Riots Spread To Major Cities Nationwide As Democrat Summer Of Rage Arrives, which attracted more than 40,000 simultaneous listeners when viewed by the Guardian on Tuesday morning. Though protests against deportations have occurred in other cities, the same level of chaos as seen in Los Angeles has not. A broadcast on X by the news outlet Reuters, Los Angeles after fourth night of immigration protests, had drawn just 13,000 viewers at the same time.

The proliferation of misinformation degrades X’s utility as a news source, though Musk continually tweets that it is the top news app in this country or that, most recently Qatar, a minor distinction. Old photos and videos mix with new and sow doubt in legitimate reporting. Since purchasing Twitter and renaming it X in late 2022, Musk has dismantled many of the company’s own initiatives for combatting the proliferation of lies, though he has promoted the user-generated fact-checking feature, “community notes”. During the 2024 US presidential election in particular, the X CEO himself became a hub for the spread of false information, say researchers. In his dozens of posts per day, he posted and reposted incorrect or misleading claims that reached about 2bn views, according to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.