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Meta continued effort to increase its workforce with AI experts from Apple

Meta continued effort to increase its workforce with AI experts from Apple

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Meta, the American tech giant behind Facebook and Instagram, has hired two former Apple AI specialists, Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, shortly after recruiting their former supervisors.

According to sources familiar with the matter, both experts will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs team. Lee has already started his new role, while Gunter is set to begin in the coming days.

The tech giant’s action demonstrates a growing trend in the tech ecosystem involving stiff competition for AI talent. Additionally, it has been very proactive in its staff recruitment.

Meta increases its workforce with AI experts from Apple 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has demonstrated a strong commitment to artificial intelligence, motivated by its surging global demand. His dedication is evident in the company’s heavy investments in AI, the recruitment of top AI talent, and a substantial boost in spending on data centers.

With this, the company aims to cement its position as the leader in AI, beating up its rivals such as OpenAI and Google.

Following the tech firm’s hiring move, the company recruited Ruoming Pang, former head of Apple’s Foundation Models team, early in the month. The tech company offered him a significant salary package of $200 million to win Pang, effective for several years. Coincidentally, Pang teamed up with Gunter and Lee at Apple, who have also left the company for Zuckerberg’s company.

In addition, the two were the longest-serving members in Pang’s team. Lee was his first worker at Apple. On the other hand, Gunter was a reputable engineer in the firm. After departing from Apple, Gunter accepted a job offer from another AI company but stepped down from that role following Meta’s offer.

Meta’s recent hires demonstrate an ongoing disorder in the Apple Foundation Models (AFM) team. The team is responsible for creating an effective technology useful in generative AI.

The AFM team is also facing uncertainties due to the company’s AI executives’ decision to initiate external models into their operations as a solution to improve its Siri voice assistant, among other Apple Intelligence features.

AI Senior Vice President John Giannandrea is among the AI executives at Apple. Under the research leader Daphne Luong, the team is weighing some strategic changes with Mike Rockwell and Craig Federighi, software leaders currently overseeing Siri. 

Neither Meta’s spokesperson nor Apple replied to a request for comment.

Meta offers Apple’s employees significant salary packages

Apple is developing parallel versions of its voice assistant using in-house AI models and third-party technologies to deliver long-promised enhancements to Siri, such as leveraging personal data to fulfill user queries. However, before its launch next spring, the company must decide which software backbone will power the revamped assistant.

Meta has seized on Apple’s internal indecision by aggressively recruiting its AI talent with highly lucrative job offers. In many instances, Meta offers several times higher salaries than Apple’s compensation for engineers in its Apple Foundation Models group. 

In response, Apple has begun issuing raises to select members of the roughly 100-person team to retain the talent.

Yet, those counteroffers pale compared to what Meta compared to the table. One high-profile defector, Gunter, is among several AI specialists receiving multiyear compensation packages exceeding $100 million.

Mark Zuckerberg underscored Meta’s ambitions earlier this week, posting on Threads that the company plans to “invest hundreds of billions of dollars into computers to build superintelligence”—a nod to AI that surpasses human capabilities. At Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters, some of its top AI recruits have been strategically seated near Zuckerberg to enable close collaboration on the company’s most critical AI initiatives.

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Apple’s top AI executive to join Meta’s superintelligence team

Apple’s top AI executive to join Meta’s superintelligence team

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Apple Inc. is losing one of its top artificial intelligence leaders to rival Meta Platforms Inc., marking a significant setback in the iPhone maker’s efforts to build its generative AI capabilities.

Ruoming Pang, a distinguished engineer and head of Apple’s foundation models team, is leaving the company to join Meta’s newly formed superintelligence group, according to sources familiar with the matter. Pang, who joined Apple in 2021 from Alphabet, had been overseeing a team of roughly 100 engineers responsible for its large language models that underpin “Apple Intelligence” features across its devices.

Meta lures Apple’s AI chief with multimillion-dollar offer amid talent war

To secure Pang, Meta reportedly offered a compensation package worth tens of millions of dollars annually. The move adds to a growing list of high-profile AI talent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has poached recently, including Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, entrepreneur Daniel Gross, and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

On Monday, Meta also brought on Yuanzhi Li, formerly of OpenAI, and Anton Bakhtin from the Claude developer Anthropic, continuing a hiring spree that has seen AI talent from leading labs snap up. While Meta declined to comment, Apple, Pang, OpenAI, and Anthropic have not responded to requests for comment.

Meta has declared AI its top priority, with Zuckerberg deeply involved in building out the company’s AI unit. He’s known to personally recruit engineers, hosting them at his homes in Silicon Valley and Lake Tahoe. The company recently reorganized its AI division to concentrate on “superintelligence” — AI systems capable of matching or surpassing human-level cognitive tasks — and has committed tens of billions of dollars this year toward AI infrastructure, including chips and data centers.

Apple’s AI division faces internal struggles as morale dips and departures mount

Pang’s departure comes at a time of internal friction at Apple. Although his team’s foundation models are used in Apple Intelligence features such as Genmoji, email summarization, and the revamped Siri, the company has been exploring third-party AI solutions. Apple has held talks with both OpenAI and Anthropic to power future Siri iterations, reportedly impacting morale within Pang’s team.

Apple is leaning heavily on external partners despite publicly touting its in-house AI efforts. At its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, only a few AI features were presented as native innovations, with several reliant on partnerships, including call translation and text analysis powered by OpenAI and Google. Apple’s updated Xcode tool taps into third-party models like Claude and ChatGPT for code completion.

The departure of Pang — considered the most critical AI exit since Apple began developing Apple Intelligence — signals broader turbulence in Cupertino’s AI division. Sources say that Pang’s deputy, Tom Gunter, exited last month, and several engineers within the foundation models team, internally known as AFM, are also planning to leave for Meta or other companies.

The AFM group, once under Pang’s direct leadership, will now be led by Zhifeng Chen, with a new hierarchical structure involving multiple managers such as Chong Wang, Zirui Wang, Chung-Cheng Chiu, and Guoli Yin.

Apple’s AI strategy is steered by software head Craig Federighi and Mike Rockwell; the engineering lead behind the Vision Pro and now Siri. Meanwhile, AI research remains under John Giannandrea, who was recently stripped of direct oversight of key AI consumer products amid delays and criticism of Apple’s AI rollout.

As the talent war in AI intensifies, Pang’s high-profile defection underscores Apple’s challenges in retaining top minds — and the pressure it’s under to stay competitive against faster-moving rivals like Meta, OpenAI, and Google.

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