Meta has successfully recruited a major AI executive from Apple, further intensifying competition in the tech world. Apple, already behind its rivals in AI advancements, is losing a key member of its team. Ruoming Pang, who joined Apple from Alphabet in 2021, is leaving to join Meta’s superintelligence team. Pang previously managed Apple’s AI foundation models (AFM) team, a group responsible for creating large, general-purpose AI models capable of performing a wide range of tasks.
These foundation models serve as the basis for building more specialized AI applications, saving significant development time and resources.
Pang’s departure marks a significant loss for Apple, which has struggled to keep pace with the progress made by companies like Meta, Samsung, and Google in the AI field. According to sources familiar with the move, Pang has been offered a lucrative contract at Meta, reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars annually. Pang’s new role will be part of Meta’s superintelligence team, focused on ensuring the safety and benefit of highly intelligent AI systems for humanity.
Meta’s AI push doesn’t end with Pang’s hire. The company is also bringing on OpenAI researcher Yuanzhi Li and Anton Bakhtin, who previously worked on Claude, a series of large language models created by Anthropic. These models are designed to balance capability with ethical considerations, aiming to create helpful, honest, and harmless AI assistants.
During his time at Apple, Pang managed a team of 100 people, responsible for developing the large language models used in Apple Intelligence and various AI features across Apple devices. Last month, Apple announced that it would open its AI models to third-party developers, potentially leading to a surge of new applications for iPhone and iPad users. However, Pang’s team has faced internal challenges, particularly from executives who have pushed for integrating third-party models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to improve Siri.
It seems likely that Apple’s next version of Siri will incorporate either Pang’s team’s models or third-party options. With Meta offering much higher salaries to AI engineers, it is expected that more members of the AFM team could follow Pang’s lead and leave Apple. The AFM team will now be led by Zhifeng Chen, while Apple’s AI strategy will be overseen by Craig Federighi, the head of software engineering, and Mike Rockwell, who heads Siri’s engineering.