Outlier (Smart Ecosystem, Inc.)

About Outlier (Smart Ecosystem, Inc.)

Outlier, operated by Smart Ecosystem, Inc., is an artificial intelligence training data platform that recruits subject-matter experts in fields such as software engineering, mathematics, science, the humanities, and language to contribute prompts, model responses, evaluations, and reinforcement learning feedback used by leading generative artificial intelligence laboratories to train and align large language models. The company is based in San Francisco, California and operates as part of the Scale AI group. Smart Ecosystem and the Outlier platform were developed within Scale AI, the data infrastructure company founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo and headquartered in San Francisco. Outlier was launched as a dedicated brand for Scale's expert contributor workforce focused on generative artificial intelligence projects, and grew into the primary channel through which freelance experts engage with Scale's frontier model partners. In 2024 and 2025 Outlier expanded its global contributor base to several hundred thousand experts working remotely from the United States, India, the Philippines, Latin America, Europe, and other regions. Outlier's contributor experience includes a project marketplace that lists current open projects with skill, language, and seniority requirements; tooling for prompt creation, response evaluation, code review, and chain-of-thought reasoning; and a payments and tax workflow that supports many countries. The platform supports text, code, and multimodal projects across more than 40 languages. Outlier engages contributors as freelance subject-matter experts rather than as employees, and Smart Ecosystem and Scale AI together employ several thousand people in full-time roles across product, engineering, operations, and trust and safety. Fresher and early-career engagement at Outlier in India is primarily through freelance contributor projects in software engineering, mathematics, sciences, and language tasks, with sign-ups routed through the Outlier platform at outlier.ai.

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