Apple's AI brain drain continues as fourth researcher goes to Meta
The Apple Intelligence team is continuing to endure a brain drain following a fourth researcher's move over to Meta.
Image credit: Meta
Reports across the summer have indicated that Apple has at least some trouble holding onto its AI researchers. The latest incident has Meta pulling a fourth engineer from the Apple Intelligence team over the course of a month.
Bowen Zhang departed Apple on Friday for Meta, according to unnamed sources in a new Bloomberg report. Zhang joins Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL), a group working on producing an AI that can surpass human intelligence.
While at Apple, Zhang was part of the Apple foundational models group, which worked on the core technology of Apple's AI work.
Zhang, the fourth Apple AI researcher to be poached by Meta in quick succession, follows after a number of other high-profile AI departures from Apple. All of which all occurred over just a month.
The list includes Tom Gunter, a senior large language model researcher who was initially reported as out of Apple on June 30. He was later confirmed on the MSL team on July 17.
Then there was the July 7 report about Ruoming Pang, the head of the foundational models team. That was a hiring that will reportedly cost Meta $200 million.
The third in the month was Mark Lee, another AFM member.
Inevitable departures
The quick construction of a team within Meta using four researchers taken from Apple at great cost is a problem. It's not a major crisis, though.
Apple, and practically all other tech companies with a hand in AI, are having to deal with rival firms trying to draw away their employees. As Meta has demonstrated, this can be an extremely costly exercise in some cases.
Apple is clearly understanding the issues with retention, as the report says that it has been "marginally increasing" the pay of AFM employees. However, those increases are apparently nowhere near as much as rival companies are prepared to pay out.
The AFM team itself is based around a few dozen individuals, built up within a few years. But, while the loss of four to Meta within a month seems like a lot, Apple is almost certainly trying to fill those openings with other researchers.
There's certainly a drain of institutional knowledge at play here, but it's an issue that Apple can avoid by hiring more workers. It hasn't quite reached the Meta level of drawing employees with massive compensation packets, but it certainly has the resources available if it decides to go down that road.
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Comments
Good riddance. Loyalty means something, and Apple doesn't need anyone non-committed filling its ranks.
At least here in California loyalty to a company is not a contractual obligation. It is an at-will sentiment that like work relationships can be terminated at any time.
Silicon Valley is built by people who left their previous employers to build something better. Shockley Labs begat Fairchild Semiconductor which begat Intel which begat hundreds of semiconductor startups.
There's a fair amount of talent flow between the big companies: Apple, Google, Meta, HP, Cisco, Yahoo, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, etc. let alone the number of people moving about the smaller ships and startups. Having a 30 year career at a single company in Silicon Valley is a rarity.
On top of that AI is a nascent industry, really just getting started. No one was really talking about it in the pandemic (people were still more fixated on cryptocurrency mining). It's really just within the past three years that AI has moved to the forefront of tech discussion topics. It's not surprising that these top-tier AI engineers are jumping ship to haul in more dollars. Someday soon they might be replaced by someone vastly cheaper using some AI clusters to do 3x to 5x more work.
As always (not just AI and not just high tech) the best and brightest are usually the first to leave. They can see the writing on the wall, they have more opportunities than others.
Where is this gap coming from?
I hope Apple gets some clear pictures about their own AFM models.
Do you really think Zuckerberg is going to pay or live up to the $200 million payday? What’s the catch? Think about it: 200 million is almost half of what Apple paid for the Next computer, which cost $404 million. This is an example of an out-of-control owner-founder CEO who’s spending money like a drunken sailor.
So far, this drunken CEO is tens of billions of dollars in the hole with his AI and VR projects, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. And by the way, if you’re still putting together or hiring people at this point, you definitely don’t have any solutions that are better than any of the competition, including Apple.
Whatever Meta is throwing all this money is not in the interests of humanity.
But even someone working in a fairly simple role still has the protection of modern workplace legal intepretation. It's not like someone who signs up to work at minimum wage will not get paid half of their weekly wages because the boss just didn't want to pay up. That's illegal and employers who have done so end up paying huge fines, etc.
In the same way, if Zuck hires a tile company to install a new marble countertop in his kitchen, he still has to pay what's agreed to in the sales contract.
And it's not like these AI scientists and engineers are newbs, snot-nosed brats who just got their bachelor's degree six weeks ago. They signed a similar contract when they joined with Apple and other contracts with employers before that. And probably all of them have seen contracts for automobiles, real estate, etc. This is not their first rodeo by far.
I don't know what it is about computer geeks but so many online commenters seem to think that they are the most intellectually superior people on the planet, even when discussing people in the tech industry. Hell, if these commenters are so smart, why aren't they signing job offers with $200M in compensation? Some of these comments are so completely detached from reality that it's almost like an SNL parody of online tech commenting.
As far as the CEO spending money indiscriminately, I'm pretty sure former COO Sheryl Sandberg set up some policies in house long ago (when the company still had adult supervision) that require some sort of oversight for any sort of expenditure that's over a certain threshold. My guess is that some sort of massive salary or compensation expense must be approved by two other C-level executives, maybe the COO, Chief People Officer, CFO, or General Counsel, as well as someone like the controller. Even Zuck doesn't have an open piggy bank, Meta is still a publicly traded company.
But then again, this is the same executive team and BOD that signed off on Zuck's silly Metaverse hallucination...
Whatever Kool-Aid Zuck is serving, it is sure tasty! LOL
this isn’t just life changing for the person who gets it, but also for their children and their children.
... and yes in those days it was usually preceeded by a visit from Tim Cook (then COO) the week before the firings - as we were not in the US.