Meta has poached two more heavyweights from Apple's AI team

AppleInsider

After luring one of Apple's chief AI researchers with a blockbuster pay package, Meta has now hired two more key members of his former team.

Image credit: Meta

One week ago, we learned that Meta poached Apple Foundation Models (AFM) head, Ruoming Pang, paying out a $200 million sign-on bonus. Now, it seems as though the tech giant has come back around for seconds.

According to Bloomberg, Meta has also acquired two of AFM's key members, Mark Lee and Tom Gunter. The pair will join Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL) team.

Lee was known for being Pang's first hire at Apple. Gunter was a distinguished engineer at Apple with an eight year tenure; he departed the company in late June.

Meta's push for AI dominance

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has openly said he'd be willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI data centers. It makes sense that he'd want to staff MSL with the best talent money could buy.

Apple isn't the only company Meta has recruited from. The company has been on an aggressive hiring spree, aiming to pull in top AI talent from across the industry.

That includes OpenAI. CEO Sam Altman says Meta approached members of his team with signing bonuses reportedly reaching as high as $100 million.

Others on the MSL team include former GitHub head Nat Friedman, Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang, and AI startup founder Daniel Gross.



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rogue01

Poaching AI talent from Apple?  Really?  Has Meta never used Siri?  Are they following the disaster of Apple Intelligence?  One would think poaching from Apple for AI talent would be the last place anyone would look.  Or, these individuals are experts in AI, but Apple's ridiculous restrictions are preventing them from demonstrating their expertise, so they happily bailed and went elsewhere.  I am not holding my breath on Apple 'fixing' Siri, especially when they claim it won't be fixed until late Spring 2026.  Apple is behind in AI and continuing to fall behind in AI.

applealways

when Doug Field left Apple ,it became clear that the car project was going nowhere, now the exodus of key members of AI team- it's really worrisome when the key insiders leave. 

anthogag

I hope there are too many cooks in the kitchen and MSL becomes a fiasco and hopefully a dud, like Neymar in the Saudi soccer (bush)league.

Zuckerberg is showing one way to take the lead in AI research is to poach your competitors talent.  

charlesn

Rogue01 said:

Poaching AI talent from Apple?  Really?  Has Meta never used Siri?  Are they following the disaster of Apple Intelligence?  One would think poaching from Apple for AI talent would be the last place anyone would look. 

I have to admit, this is pretty funny and not untrue--but maybe you missed the part about the $200 million bonus just to sign--god only knows what the actual compensation package is! Name the absolute top athlete in any sport and they're not getting anything remotely in the same galaxy as this just to sign their contract. All of which to say: you don't spend money like this to acquire B players. I have to assume that Ruoming Pang is the shit when it comes to AI expertise, and now he has taken some top people with him. This has to be a real hit to Apple, considering that they need top AI talent now more than ever. 

edited 12:44AM

blackwhitepanda

Rogue01 said:

Poaching AI talent from Apple?  Really?  Has Meta never used Siri?  Are they following the disaster of Apple Intelligence?  One would think poaching from Apple for AI talent would be the last place anyone would look.  Or, these individuals are experts in AI, but Apple's ridiculous restrictions are preventing them from demonstrating their expertise, so they happily bailed and went elsewhere.  I am not holding my breath on Apple 'fixing' Siri, especially when they claim it won't be fixed until late Spring 2026.  Apple is behind in AI and continuing to fall behind in AI.

Siri is a model, which integrates several functionalities within several apps. Siri is more complex than just a single LLM app. But it is no execuse or defend Apple. 
Even Alexa or Google could not provide a proper solution about voice assistant although Amazon is heavily invested in Antrophic or Google has Gemini. 

Apple wants Siri to run locally. For local on-device running, former AI experts from Apple may have more knowledge with their experienced and deep researches than any others from META.

Even Steve Jobs can be replaced. Therefore, I don't worry that one or few AI experts leave Apple as long as new fresh AI experts can come. But it does not seem to be the case.
It will be more serious if the whole team wants to leave Apple, which seems to be the case. More and more researchers are willing to leave.

The market does not seem to be confident about Apple when their stock has been flat since April 25 while others are hitting ATH. 

Tim Cook has been silent. Maybe, he is preparing something. But he needs to respond. 

beowulfschmidt

Well, these people were obviously not as dedicated to Apple as they should have been, otherwise they would never have left such an awesome company for such a sh*thole of a company as Meta.  Apple is better off without them. /s

michelb76

Rogue01 said:

Poaching AI talent from Apple?  Really?  Has Meta never used Siri?  Are they following the disaster of Apple Intelligence?  One would think poaching from Apple for AI talent would be the last place anyone would look.  Or, these individuals are experts in AI, but Apple's ridiculous restrictions are preventing them from demonstrating their expertise, so they happily bailed and went elsewhere.  I am not holding my breath on Apple 'fixing' Siri, especially when they claim it won't be fixed until late Spring 2026.  Apple is behind in AI and continuing to fall behind in AI.

There is a LOT of talent at Apple, you can just figure that out by the papers and certain WWDC videos. There are also a lot of horrid VP's at Apple.

michelb76

Do you want to sell create cool stuff for the rest of your life, or do you want to destroy teen mental health and create a dystopian world? - Mark Z.

edited 8:29AM

blastdoor

Rogue01 said:

Poaching AI talent from Apple?  Really?  Has Meta never used Siri?  Are they following the disaster of Apple Intelligence?  One would think poaching from Apple for AI talent would be the last place anyone would look.  Or, these individuals are experts in AI, but Apple's ridiculous restrictions are preventing them from demonstrating their expertise, so they happily bailed and went elsewhere.  I am not holding my breath on Apple 'fixing' Siri, especially when they claim it won't be fixed until late Spring 2026.  Apple is behind in AI and continuing to fall behind in AI.

Apple’s problems with AI are not a lack of brilliant employees, money, or IP. They have the inputs. The problem is senior management having difficulty pulling all the inputs together into a compelling product. 

blastdoor

Two hundred million dollars as a signing bonus is not something I’ve seen before. That’s crazy. But I guess there’s a compensating differential for working for pure evil