🧙🏼 Meta drops $14B on Scale AI

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Howdy wizards,

Welcome to the 286 new subscribers that joined last week.

In this edition:

• OpenAI slashes the cost of o3 by 80% and launches o3 Pro

• Meta’s $14B investment into data provider Scale AI

• I tested Dia, the new AI-first web browser everyone’s talking about

Grab a cup of deep black Joe and locate your preferred spot for focused relaxation.

Here’s what’s brewing in AI.

DARIO’S PICKS

1. Meta invests $14B into Scale AI

Meta just secured the secret sauce behind every major AI model. Zuck & co are currently finalising a deal to buy 49% of Scale AI—the largest provider of data-labelling for training AI models which the leading players have become depended on at this point—for about $14 billion.

Scale AI is the unsexy company that manually labels all the data that makes ChatGPT actually work. They've got armies of gig workers worldwide doing the controversial work of teaching AI what's what.

Speaking of controversial, a Meta employee revealed on Hacker News that technical teams were avoiding Scale's data while executives kept pushing them to use it anyway. Mystery finally solved.

The acquihire also includes key employees from Scale including its 28-year-old CEO Alexandr Wang to beef up Meta’s AI efforts, because apparently that's what $14B gets you these days.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ This is much bigger than Meta just using Scale data for the next Llama model. Microsoft and OpenAI are key customers of Scale AI, and Meta just bought the infrastructure layer underneath them.

Meta's positioning to profit on every AI breakthrough for the next decade. NVIDIA owns the hardware layer—Meta just claimed the data layer.

“If you can’t beat, tax ‘em.” —Mark Zuckerberg in my imagination

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DARIO’S PICKS

2. OpenAI launches o3 Pro and slashes o3 costs

OpenAI is decreasing the price of o3 by a whopping 80% in the API. Translation? Building advanced AI into products just became about 5x cheaper.

They also launched o3 Pro, available to ChatGPT Pro and Team users and via API. Unsurprisingly, it consistently outperforms their existing top models: o3 and o1-pro.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ An 80% price drop? That's not generosity—that's chess. OpenAI's basically saying “good luck competing with our $40B war chest” to everyone else in the game.

Between their OpenAI for Countries initiative, giving the whole UAE free ChatGPT Plus, and locking in a deal with California State University’s 500,000 students & staff, OpenAI’s strategy is clear: get everywhere—first.

UP CLOSE

In this mini-series I share different ways I’m using AI from week to week, as well as practical tips & tricks I discover and actually use.

I spent two hours with Dia — the Browser Company’s AI-native web browser

Important heads-up: Dia is currently in private beta, only available to existing Arc users, and requires a MacBook with M1 chip or above. There's a waitlist for everyone else.

Remember Arc? That beautiful, hierarchical sidebar browser that was supposed to revolutionize how we navigate the web? Yeah, they've essentially stopped developing it. Not because it wasn't useful—Arc still has devoted fans—but because it was different enough from the traditional browsing experience to make mass adoption difficult. The Browser Company didn't give up, though. They pivoted to something that looks familiar, but with AI at its core: Dia has been quietly testing with students for a couple of months, but they just opened it up to existing Arc users this week.

After two hours of testing, I'm genuinely conflicted about whether this is brilliant or another less-than-essential subscription waiting to happen.

The good: chatting with your tabs

Dia has an integrated chatbot that lives in your sidebar (⌘ + E), and you can customize its tone and writing style to your preferences. The big difference to using ChatGPT is that it has access to your browser, which enables you to—among other things—chat with your tabs.

Unless I’m the only person finding myself frantically copy-pasting content from multiple tabs into ChatGPT or Claude all the time, then this actually solves a real problem.

With Dia, I can @-tag specific tabs or select "All open tabs" and ask questions like "compare these products/hotel rooms/movies/whatever” across everything I have open.

It's beautifully simple.

Also good: email generation that feels safe and has context

Dia can draft emails in its chat window and gives you a button to insert them directly into your email drafts.

Unlike Gmail's "generate with AI" button (which feels a bit like playing Russian roulette with the send button), Dia uses its safe sandbox for generating the content.

Even better: it can pull context from your calendar to find availability and tailor emails accordingly. Not sure I’ll personally use this, but it's a thoughtful integration.

The bad: I want it to search my web, not the web

Here's where my enthusiasm dampens. When trying to chat with my tabs, Dia sometimes decides to search the web, too, even when I've just tagged my open tabs. When I get random web information mixed in with my curated sources, my purpose of containing the context window to my tabs disappears. I found that being overly specific—both @-tagging tabs AND saying "use the open tabs to..."—solved this, but those extra keystrokes felt unnecessary. It's a small friction, but hints at the broader challenge of letting AI decide when to use web browsing by itself; it can’t read your mind (yet).

“When are they going to start charging me?”

I’m all for innovation and disrupting Chrome and Safari’s duopoly of the browser market would be refreshing. However, these have until now been free to use and (mostly) secure tools. So that makes me hesitant to switch to any other browser that doesn’t have the same baseline—even if it can chat with my tabs.

Dia is free for now, but I can't shake the feeling that Dia will probably become yet another subscription soon. AI features do cost money to run. You’re probably already paying for an AI that can do the same thing, only with a bit more copy pasting. Combined with AI features popping up in traditional browsers too (Opera and Chrome are on it) it makes it seem less likely that people will pay for it. So unless they find a good way to make money outside of monthly fees, then I think getting to the masses might prove tricky.

Then there’s the security aspect—The Browser Company is still a startup and has only five people currently working on security. We do use our browsers for many sensitive tasks. That’s something I’d take into account when considering this new tool too.

My two-hour verdict

After limited testing, Dia feels like it could be genuinely useful for browsing the web. The ability to do cross-tab comparison is really something. The email drafting feels a notch above Gmail’s native features (I don’t really use them).

But I’m cautious to go full in on Dia. It has a long way to go to be an iPhone moment. But it’s also not another Humane Pin-level cash grab with better marketing. It’s somewhere in between—useful and with potential, though not fully ripe yet.

END OF TRANSMISSION

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