Data-labeling startup Scale AI has hired the team behind Pesto AI, which helps companies recruit developers remotely, according to a blog post by one of Pesto’s founders.
Founded in 2017 by Ayush Jaiswal and Indian food delivery platform Swiggy’s co-founder Rahul Jaimini, Pesto AI is backed by the likes of Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover and Gumroad’s Sahil Lavingia. According to Crunchbase, it has raised more than $8 million in funding.
Pesto will be shutting down its operations. According to its LinkedIn page, Pesto had 71 employees, but it’s not clear how many of those are joining Scale AI.
“Earlier this year, I made the exciting decision to join Scale. This move marks the next chapter in a journey I’ve been deeply passionate about for years—exploring how we can harness the power of AI to create meaningful opportunities for people around the world,” Jaiswal, whose LinkedIn profile says he now is the head of growth at Scale, wrote in the blog post.
Previous reporting about Pesto suggests the startup was also involved in educating developers during its early years.
Scale AI did not immediately return requests for comment.
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In “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future,” Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey examines our AI-obsessed moment through one of its key figures — Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.
Hagey begins with Altman’s Midwest childhood, then takes readers through his career at startup Loopt, accelerator Y Combinator, and now at OpenAI. She also sheds new light on the dramatic few days when Altman was fired, then quickly reinstated, as OpenAI’s CEO.
Looking back at what OpenAI employees now call “the Blip,” Hagey said the failed attempt to oust Altman revealed that OpenAI’s complex structure — with a for-profit company controlled by a nonprofit board — is “not stable.” And with OpenAI largely backing down from plans to let the for-profit side take control, Hagey predicted that this “fundamentally unstable arrangement” will “continue to give investors pause.”
Does that mean OpenAI could struggle to raise the funds it needs to keep going? Hagey replied that it could “absolutely” be an issue.
“My research into Sam suggests that he might well be up to that challenge,” she said. “But success is not guaranteed.”
In addition, Hagey’s biography (also available as an audiobook on Spotify) examines Altman’s politics, which she described as “pretty traditionally progressive” — making it a bit surprising that he’s struck massive infrastructure deals with the backing of the Trump administration.
“But this is one area where, in some ways, I feel like Sam Altman has been born for this moment, because he is a deal maker and Trump is a deal maker,” Hagey said. “Trump respects nothing so much as a big deal with a big price tag on it, and that is what Sam Altman is really great at.”
In an interview with TechCrunch, Hagey also discussed Altman’s response to the book, his trustworthiness, and the AI “hype universe.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You open the book by acknowledging some of the reservations that Sam Altman had about the project — this idea that we tend to focus too much on individuals rather than organizations or broad movements, and also that it’s way too early to assess the impact of OpenAI. Did you share those concerns?
Well, I don’t really share them, because this was a biography. This project was to look at a person, not an organization. And I also think that Sam Altman has set himself up in a way where it does matter what kind of moral choices he has made and what his moral formation has been, because the broad project of AI is really a moral project. That is the basis of OpenAI’s existence. So I think these are fair questions to ask about a person, not just an organization.
As far as whether it’s too soon, I mean, sure, it’s definitely [early to] assess the entire impact of AI. But it’s been an extraordinary story for OpenAI — just so far, it’s already changed the stock market, it has changed the entire narrative of business. I’m a business journalist. We do nothing but talk about AI, all day long, every day. So in that way, I don’t think it’s too early.
And despite those reservations, Altman did cooperate with you. Can you say more about what your relationship with him was like during the process of researching the book?
Well, he was definitely not happy when he was informed about the book’s existence. And there was a long period of negotiation, frankly. In the beginning, I figured I was going to write this book without his help — what we call, in the business, a write-around profile. I’ve done plenty of those over my career, and I figured this would just be one more.
Over time, as I made more and more calls, he opened up a little bit. And [eventually,] he was generous to sit down with me several times for long interviews and share his thoughts with me.
Has he responded to the finished book at all?
No. He did tweet about the project, about his decision to participate with it, but he was very clear that he was never going to read it. It’s the same way that I don’t like to watch my TV appearances or podcasts that I’m on.
In the book, he’s described as this emblematic Silicon Valley figure. What do you think are the key characteristics that make him representative of the Valley and the tech industry?
In the beginning, I think it was that he was young. The Valley really glorifies youth, and he was 19 years old when he started his first startup. You see him going into these meetings with people twice his age, doing deals with telecom operators for his first startup, and no one could get over that this kid was so smart.
The other is that he is a once-in-a-generation fundraising talent, and that’s really about being a storyteller. I don’t think it’s an accident that you have essentially a salesman and a fundraiser at the top of the most important AI company today,
That ties into one of the questions that runs through the book — this question about Altman’s trustworthiness. Can you say more about the concerns people seem to have about that? To what extent is he a trustworthy figure?
Well, he’s a salesman, so he’s really excellent at getting in a room and convincing people that he can see the future and that he has something in common with them. He gets people to share his vision, which is a rare talent.
There are people who’ve watched that happen a bunch of times, who think, “Okay, what he says does not always map to reality,” and have, over time, lost trust in him. This happened both at his first startup and very famously at OpenAI, as well as at Y Combinator. So it is a pattern, but I think it’s a typical critique of people who have the salesman skill set.
So it’s not necessarily that he’s particularly untrustworthy, but it’s part-and-parcel of being a salesman leading these important companies.
I mean, there also are management issues that are detailed in the book, where he is not great at dealing with conflict, so he’ll basically tell people what they want to hear. That causes a lot of sturm-und-drang in the management ranks, and it’s a pattern. Something like that happened at Loopt, where the executives asked the board to replace him as CEO. And you saw it happen at OpenAI as well.
You’ve touched on Altman’s firing, which was also covered in a book excerpt that was published in the Wall Street Journal. One of the striking things to me, looking back at it, was just how complicated everything was — all the different factions within the company, all the people who seemed pro-Altman one day and then anti-Altman the next. When you pull back from the details, what do you think is the bigger significance of that incident?
The very big picture is that the nonprofit governance structure is not stable. You can’t really take investment from the likes of Microsoft and a bunch of other investors and then give them absolutely no say whatsoever in the governance of the company.
That’s what they have tried to do, but I think what we saw in that firing is how power actually works in the world. When you have stakeholders, even if there’s a piece of paper that says they have no rights, they still have power. And when it became clear that everyone in the company was going to go to Microsoft if they didn’t reinstate Sam Altman, they reinstated Sam Altman.
In the book, you take the story up to maybe the end of 2024. There have been all these developments since then, which you’ve continued to report on, including this announcement that actually, they’re not fully converting to a for-profit. How do you think that’s going to affect OpenAI going forward?
It’s going to make it harder for them to raise money, because they basically had to do an about-face. I know that the new structure going forward of the public benefit corporation is not exactly the same as the current structure of the for-profit — it is a little bit more investor friendly, it does clarify some of those things.
But overall, what you have is a nonprofit board that controls a for-profit company, and that fundamentally unstable arrangement is what led to the so-called Blip. And I think you would continue to give investors pause, going forward, if they are going to have so little control over their investment.
Obviously, OpenAI is still such a capital intensive business. If they have challenges raising more money, is that an existential question for the company?
It absolutely could be. My research into Sam suggests that he might well be up to that challenge. But success is not guaranteed.
Like you said, there’s a dual perspective in the book that’s partly about who Sam is, and partly about what that says about where AI is going from here. How did that research into his particular story shape the way you now look at these broader debates about AI and society?
I went down a rabbit hole in the beginning of the book, [looking] into Sam’s father, Jerry Altman, in part because I thought it was striking how he’d been written out of basically every other thing that had ever been written about Sam Altman. What I found in this research was a very idealistic man who was, from youth, very interested in these public-private partnerships and the power of the government to set policy. He ended up having an impact on the way that affordable housing is still financed to this day.
And when I traced Sam’s development, I saw that he has long believed that the government should really be the one that is funding and guiding AI research. In the early days of OpenAI, they went and tried to get the government to invest, as he’s publicly said, and it didn’t work out. But he looks back to these great mid-20th century labs like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, which are private, but there was a ton of government money running through and supporting that ecosystem. And he says, “That’s the right way to do it.”
Now I am watching daily as it seems like the United States is summoning the forces of state capitalism to get behind Sam Altman’s project to build these data centers, both in the United States and now there was just one last week announced in Abu Dhabi. This is a vision he has had for a very, very long time.
My sense of the vision, as he presented it earlier, was one where, on the one hand, the government is funding these things and building this infrastructure, and on the other hand, the government is also regulating and guiding AI development for safety purposes. And it now seems like the path being pursued is one where they’re backing away from the safety side and doubling down on the government investment side.
Absolutely. Isn’t it fascinating?
You talk about Sam as a political figure, as someone who’s had political ambitions at different times, but also somebody who has what are in many ways traditionally liberal political views while being friends with folks like — at least early on — Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. And he’s done a very good job of navigating the Trump administration. What do you think his politics are right now?
I’m not sure his actual politics have changed, they are pretty traditionally progressive politics. Not completely — he’s been critical about things like cancel culture, but in general, he thinks the government is there to take tax revenue and solve problems.
His success in the Trump administration has been fascinating because he has been able to find their one area of overlap, which is the desire to build a lot of data centers, and just double down on that and not talk about any other stuff. But this is one area where, in some ways, I feel like Sam Altman has been born for this moment, because he is a deal maker and Trump is a deal maker. Trump respects nothing so much as a big deal with a big price tag on it, and that is what Sam Altman is really great at.
You open and close the book not just with Sam’s father, but with his family as a whole. What else is worth highlighting in terms of how his upbringing and family shapes who he is now?
Well, you see both the idealism from his father and also the incredible ambition from his mother, who was a doctor, and had four kids and worked as a dermatologist. I think both of these things work together to shape him. They also had a more troubled marriage than I realized going into the book. So I do think that there’s some anxiety there that Sam himself is very upfront about, that he was a pretty anxious person for much of his life, until he did some meditation and had some experiences.
And there’s his current family — he just had a baby and got married not too long ago. As a young gay man, growing up in the Midwest, he had to overcome some challenges, and I think those challenges both forged him in high school as a brave person who could stand up and take on a room as a public speaker, but also shaped his optimistic view of the world. Because, on that issue, I paint the scene of his wedding: That’s an unimaginable thing from the early ‘90s, or from the ‘80s when he was born. He’s watched society develop and progress in very tangible ways, and I do think that that has helped solidify his faith in progress.
Something that I’ve found writing about AI is that the different visions being presented by people in the field can be so diametrically opposed. You have these wildly utopian visions, but also these warnings that AI could end the world. It gets so hyperbolic that it feels like people are not living in the same reality. Was that a challenge for you in writing the book?
Well, I see those two visions — which feel very far apart — actually being part of the same vision, which is that AI is super important, and it’s going to completely transform everything. No one ever talks about the true opposite of that, which is, “Maybe this is going to be a cool enterprise tool, another way to waste time on the internet, and not quite change everything as much as everyone thinks.” So I see, I see the doomers and the boomers feeding off each other and being part of the same sort of hype universe.
As a journalist and as a biographer, you don’t necessarily come down on one side or the other — but actually, can you say where you come down on that?
Well, I will say that I find myself using it a lot more recently, because it’s gotten a lot better. In the early stages, when I was researching the book, I was definitely a lot more skeptical of its transformative economic power. I’m less skeptical now, because I just use it a lot more.
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TechCrunch Sessions: AI hits UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on June 5 — and today’s your shot at AI trivia glory and two tickets for the price of one.
Answer a few brain-busting questions on artificial intelligence, and if you ace it, you might just find a special promo code waiting in your inbox.
Every day brings new questions — so don’t get discouraged if you don’t know today’s answers. But don’t wait too long. The last day of Countdown AI Trivia is June 4. Don’t miss your chance to win big and be part of the AI action this Thursday.
Whether you know which AI model kicked off the large language model revolution or what year OpenAI launched ChatGPT, this is your time to shine.
Step 1: Answer the AI trivia questions on this form
Step 2: Watch your inbox for the special code if you win
Step 3: Use the code to claim your 2-for-1 ticket deal
Show off your AI knowledge in this quick trivia round.
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Artificial intelligence has no shortage of visionaries—but the ones who matter are executing. In 4 days, TechCrunch Sessions: AI brings those builders, researchers, funders, and enthusiasts under one roof at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall.
This isn’t a parade of AI hype or a string of over-edited keynotes. It’s a single day designed for clarity, candor, and real connection.
It’s also your last chance to save. Ticket prices rise soon — but right now, you can save over $300 on your pass and get 50% off a second, so your partner, co-founder, or friend can dive in with you.
Maybe it’s a fireside chat with Jared Kaplan of Anthropic on frontier models. Maybe it’s a breakout session on enterprise deployment with leaders from SAP. Or maybe it’s a deep-dive conversation sparked through the Braindate app — our smarter tool for face-to-face matching based on shared interests. You never know where the game-changing idea will come from. You just need to be in the room.
So You Think You Can Pitch puts AI startups in front of investors for live, unscripted feedback. It’s fast-paced, transparent, and sharp—exactly what early founders need to understand how real funding decisions happen.
We’ve kept the pricing generous, but the clock is ticking. Save over $300 on your TC Sessions: AI pass and get a second one at 50% off. Group discounts apply too. On June 5, prices go full fare—and with them, your shot at big savings disappears. Lock in your low rate tickets here.
Interested in a deeper discount? Participate in our AI trivia for a chance to purchase a ticket at $200 and receive a second ticket for free.
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It’s no surprise that many big, left-leaning social media accounts have recently joined Bluesky — but a new analysis from the Pew Research Center attempts to quantify that shift.
This comes as an update to Pew’s news influencer report released in November 2024, which did not include Bluesky in its numbers. The report focused on a relatively small group of 500 influencers, all of whom have more than 100,000 followers on at least one major platform and post regularly about current events.
For this Bluesky-centric update, Pew looked at those same influencers (as opposed to accounts that may have found a big audience on Bluesky exclusively) and saw that in February/March, 43% of them had an account on Bluesky. Just over half (51%) of those accounts were created after the 2024 presidential election.
There’s a big divide between influencers on the right and the left, with 69% of the left-leaning accounts (the ones that explicitly identified as liberals or Democrats and expressed support for Kamala Harris or Joe Biden before the presidential election) making the jump to Bluesky, while only 15% of the conservative ones did the same.
This movement wasn’t necessarily at the expense of X (formerly Twitter). While X owner Elon Musk’s alliance with now-President Donald Trump seemed to drive new users to Bluesky, 82% of the influencers tracked by Pew still had an account on X, down only slightly from 85% in summer 2025.
In other words, even if left-leaning influencers are dipping their toes into Bluesky, most of them (87%) haven’t abandoned X. Pew also says most influencers continue to post more regularly on X than on Bluesky.
However, Bluesky activity does appear to be picking up — the number of influencers on Bluesky who are actually posting grew from 54% in the first week of January to 66% in the last full week of March.
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The NAACP is calling on local officials to halt operations at Colossus, the “supercomputer” facility operated by Elon Musk’s xAI in South Memphis.
As reported in NBC News, leaders from the civil rights group sent a letter Thursday to the Shelby County Health Department and Memphis Light Gas and Water criticizing the organizations’ “lackadaisical approach to the operation of this dirty data center” and calling on them to “issue an emergency order for xAI to stop operations completely” — or if there’s no order, to at least cite and stop the company from allegedly violating clean air laws.
The letter expressed particular concerns around the gas turbines that xAI runs to power Colossus. The company has applied for a permit to continue operating 15 gas turbines at the facility, although the NAACP said authorities have “allowed xAI to operate at least 35 gas turbines without any permitting” over the past year. City officials have previously said xAI did not need permits for the turbines’ first year of use.
These turbines reportedly emit hazardous air pollutants, including formaldehyde, at levels exceeding EPA limits. The NAACP’s letter also pointed to the turbines’ nitrogen-oxide emissions.
Noting that the Colossus facility is located near South Memphis’ Boxtown neighborhood, which the letter described as a “historically Black community,” the NAACP said the location perpetuates “the trend of industries adding pollution to communities who do not cause the problem.”
“Instead of [the Shelby County Health Department] working to reduce health issues known in the area including that cancer risks are already four times the national average, it has allowed xAI to operate above the law,” the NAACP added.
The NAACP’s letter is addressed to Shelby County Health Department Director Michelle Taylor, as well as Memphis Light Gas and Water’s commissioners; Taylor is leaving her role in Shelby County to become the commissioner of the Baltimore City Health Department.
TechCrunch has reached out to the NAACP and xAI for comment. A spokesperson for Memphis Light Gas and Water told NBC News that it had not yet received the NAACP letter.
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