Scale AI vs Surge AI

Scale AI and Surge AI are both American startups focused on data annotation for AI training. Both serve large tech companies like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, which are developing large language models. They use human-in-the-loop approache to improve data quality and employ RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback).

But Scale AI (founded in 2016) is a Meta-backed company that labels any data (text, images, videos, sensor data i.e. for 3D worlds). The company has two separate divisions: Remotasks (for basic annotation tasks) and Outlier (for working with language data and RLHF). It is developing own AI platform for automating data labeling and quality evaluation. Scale AI works with government and defense contracts, participates in LLM assessments for government agencies and undergoes certification for compliance with security standards.

Surge AI (2020) focuses on language data annotation and, in particular, implements projects where annotators should be matched to data by their expertise, Because of this the company faces criticism for passing data to third-party independent contractors which undermines data transparency and security. Surge AI has several subsidiary annotation platforms (Taskup.ai, DataAnnotation.tech, Gethybrid.io).