Scale AI shut down an entire team of contractors in its Dallas office this week, marking the latest restructuring at the startup since Mark Zuckerberg‘s Meta invested $14.3 billion in the company in June. The shuttered team, known internally as the NPO or New Projects Organization, had over a dozen members who focused on generalist tasks such as improving the writing ability of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots.Scale AI attributed the cuts to an industry shift toward more technical, expert-level training work, according to Business Insider. As AI chatbots improve, they increasingly require input from humans with specialised skills in fields like medicine, robotics, and finance, rather than generalist contractors.

“Scale wound down a small experimental onsite program in Dallas staffed by a contract workforce,” Scale AI spokesperson Natalia Montalvo said.“This reflects an industry shift toward higher skill, expert data work. It only affects a small fraction of our overall workforce and has no impact on customer delivery,” Montalvo was quoted as saying.

Scale AI offered the laid-off workers four weeks of severance pay and healthcare coverage through October, according to an email from HireArt, a staffing agency used extensively by Scale AI. The recently terminated workers were also invited to join Scale’s gig-work platform, Outlier, where thousands of freelancers help train AI models.“As you navigate this transition, we want to ensure you are aware of alternative opportunities,” the email stated.Montalvo added that Scale AI continues to expand expert-level programmes and that broader groups of contractors continue to work in Dallas.The Dallas layoffs represent the latest in a series of cuts at Scale AI since the Meta investment. xAI has also made similar moves to focus on specialised AI training, recently downsizing its team of generalist AI tutors in September.