Meta has paid $14.3 billionen for 49% stake in Scale AI, which prepares training data for AI systems, and recruited its founder, Alexander Wang, to work on Meta’s own AI program. Scale AI will continue as an independent vendor, now valued at $29 billion. Scale’s clients include nearly all genAI vendors.

“Hyper-personalized commerce journeys” sound great until you think how much work it is to create them. Commerce platform FERMÀT doesn’t generate all that content in real time, but offers the next best thing: agents that can generate thousands (or is it millions?) of variations in advance and then match those to the right customers in real time. The company just raised a $45 million Series B funding to move things along.

The web search tool Perplexity looks like it’s taking on Google with its latest release, a web browser named Comet. Comet claims to move “from browsing to thinking,” surfacing information and search results in response to natural language queries. Comet is available immediately to Perplexity Max subscribers; others can join a wait list.