Meta lures Apple's top AI manager to join

The fierce battle for talent in the field of artificial intelligence continues, this time with losses for Apple. Ruoming Pang, a top manager responsible for artificial intelligence models at the Cupertino company, is moving to Meta, Bloomberg reports.

Ruoming Pang led Apple’s Foundation Models team. He led a team of about 100 people responsible for the large language models that underpin Apple Intelligence and other AI features. At the same time, the company’s leadership had recently been exploring the possibility of using third-party models, including OpenAI and Anthropic, to power Siri, and this was undermining the team’s morale.

To get Pang on its team, Meta offered him a package worth tens of millions of dollars a year, people familiar with the matter said. This coincides with the company's strategy, which after creating a laboratory for the development of superintelligence Meta Superintelligence began to actively lure employees from other companies.

In addition to Pang, Meta has in recent months acquired three OpenAI researchers, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai. Before that, the CEO of Scale AI joined Mark Zuckerberg's company in a deal worth $14.3 billion.

In late June, it was revealed that Mark Zuckerberg was personally overseeing the hiring of new AI specialists. At the time, it was reported that he had promised some candidates compensation of up to $100 million or the opportunity to buy out their projects. He contacted most of the candidates via WhatsApp.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman criticized Zuckerberg's policy, and at the same time revealed that Meta's CEO offered hundreds of millions of dollars to specialists at the company that develops the most popular chatbot ChatGPT. At the same time, OpenAI began reviewing the terms for talents who decide to stay with the company.

In early July, more information emerged about what exactly Zuckerberg was promising new talent. According to reports, specialists who decide to move to Meta are offered compensation packages of up to $300 million over four years, with more than $100 million paid in the first year. A little later, it became known that AI software engineers at Meta can earn up to $480 thousand per year.