Meta Platforms is in advanced talks to invest around $14 billion into Scale AI and hire the startup's chief executive, Alexandr Wang, to help lead its AI efforts, according to people familiar with the matter.

The deal would be one of the social-media giant's largest-ever outside investments and show the dramatic steps it is taking to revamp its AI work, which has suffered setbacks including the delayed release of a major new model. As part of the proposed deal -- which is still being finalized -- other Scale AI employees would join Meta alongside Wang as part of a new effort to develop advanced AI called superintelligence.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally got involved in the recruitment for the superintelligence effort after the company struggled to develop its recent Llama models, including by reaching out to AI researchers directly on WhatsApp, according to a person familiar with his approach.

On Tuesday, Chris Cox, Meta's chief product officer, sent an internal memo to some employees saying that the company was finalizing details on its plans for AI leadership.

Tech giants have largely struggled to keep up with the pace of AI innovation, forcing them to look toward younger startups for fresh talent. Antitrust scrutiny in recent years has made it difficult for them to acquire companies, so they are instead resorting to large minority investments in startups that allow them to hire their key employees. Last year, Microsoft, Amazon.com and Google all made similar deals for other AI startups.

Unlike those startups, however, Scale AI isn't a research lab focused on building its own large language models from scratch. The startup is instead a data-labeling company, managing over 100,000 contractors from across the world who label images, write sentences and type out stories that help AI chatbots learn how to think and speak like humans. The startup has sold its services to OpenAI, Google and Meta, and has more recently begun to build software products that help businesses create AI tools, though that is a smaller part of its business.

The investment would give Meta 49% of the company, people familiar with the deal said. The social-media giant and the startup have discussed an arrangement in which Meta would receive nonvoting shares. Should those turn into voting shares, Wang would have control over them, one of the people said.

A portion of the invested cash would be given to Scale shareholders, who would retain their ownership in the startup, the person said. Bloomberg and other outlets previously reported details of the deal.

Tech companies big and small are racing to build AI models that can surpass human intelligence, a threshold that industry leaders believe will reshape how society and the economy are organized as well as lavish riches onto the technology's winners.

While Meta deployed AI on a massive scale in the past year, the company has struggled to release a more advanced version of its biggest Llama model, delaying it until the fall or later. Two other recently released models came under fire after it was revealed that Meta submitted different versions of the models to a third-party performance test than they delivered to the general public.

Last month, senior executives at the company were so frustrated about the performance of the Llama team that they were considering making significant management changes to the group, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.