Meta Releases First Proprietary AI Model: Muse Spark
The model is intended for personal AI use, and the vendor admits it is limited in certain agentic capabilities and coding.
Meta
Groups Set Up to Shill AI and Data Centers Are Pouring Huge Sums of Money Into the Midterm Elections
Artificial intelligence remains deeply unpopular with the American public. One poll found it’s even more reviled than ICE, which is no small feat given the mass protests that erupt whenever the agency’s goons march into another US city.
A few political action groups are hoping to turn that around. Going into the 2026 midterm elections, the Financial Times reports, newly-formed PACs with major tech industry backing are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to shape how voters think about AI regulation.
Some of the groups cast a wide net, like Leading the Future, a super PAC backed by Trump donors and AI barons like OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and tech venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz. Founded in August of 2025, Leading the Future has raised over $125 million to back pro-AI candidates who oppose state-level regulations, according to the FT.
Others, like the pro-regulation PAC Public First Action, serve as vehicles for individual AI companies to push their agendas. Backed solely by Anthropic, this group aims to raise $75 million to boost candidates who want to preserve state’s individual rights to regulate AI. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta also has its own pet super PAC, the American Technology Excellence Project, which aims to spend $65 million on state-level candidates who will “defend American tech leadership at home and abroad” — a fluffy way of saying “oppose AI regulation.”
This jockeying over states’ rights to regulate AI is the key question in the 2026 PAC wars. Though Republicans have largely staked their flag as the party of small government — which was always a selective attitude, to be fair — Donald Trump is now pushing for a major expansion of federal power. His latest AI framework seeks to concentrate regulatory authority over the tech at the executive level, which would effectively strip all 50 states of oversight power.
Bankrolling that push is Innovation Council Action, a hawkish super PAC backed by Trump advisor and PayPal mafioso David Sacks and led by former Trump communications aide Taylor Budowich. The newly formed group plans to spend at least $100 million supporting candidates who aren’t just pro-AI, but who will commit to carrying out Trump’s consolidation agenda, exclusively.
That PAC marks a major challenge to groups like Leading the Future, which Trump and his cabinet found to be insufficiently loyal.
“President Trump has made it clear, America will win the AI race against China, period,” Budowich told Fox. “He built the framework, he’s leading from the front, and this organization exists to make sure he doesn’t fight that battle alone. The cavalry is coming to back up the policymakers who stand with the president and will hold accountable the ones who don’t.”
More on AI and politics: Insiders Afraid the Government Will Nationalize the AI Industry
The post Groups Set Up to Shill AI and Data Centers Are Pouring Huge Sums of Money Into the Midterm Elections appeared first on Futurism.
Meta continued effort to increase its workforce with AI experts from Apple
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 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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