Apple has lost one of its top artificial intelligence executives to Meta, deepening the intensifying rivalry for talent among Silicon Valley’s AI giants. Ruoming Pang, who led Apple’s foundation models team, is departing the company to join Meta’s newly formed “superintelligence” division, according to individuals familiar with the matter.
Pang’s exit marks the most high-profile defection from Apple’s AI ranks since it launched its Apple Intelligence initiative, wrote Bloomberg. He joined the company in 2021 from Alphabet Inc. and oversaw roughly 100 engineers working on large language models, which support key Apple features such as Genmoji, email summarization, and Priority Notifications.
Meta confirmed Monday that it had hired Pang. Sources close to the deal said the Facebook parent offered him “a package worth tens of millions of dollars per year.” Neither Apple nor Pang responded to requests for comment, nor did representatives from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The recruitment drive at Meta has been led directly by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who in recent months has stepped up efforts to lure top-tier AI researchers — hosting candidates at his homes in Silicon Valley and Lake Tahoe and offering compensation well above industry norms. “Meta has been making offers to the world’s top engineers worth many millions of dollars per year — significantly more than what the iPhone maker pays its engineers doing similar work,” one source said.
Zuckerberg has declared AI the company’s foremost priority and, in June, reorganized Meta’s internal teams to focus on building “superintelligence” — AI systems capable of outperforming human cognition. The company has pledged to invest “tens of billions of dollars” in computing infrastructure to back the effort, including chips and data centers. In addition to Pang, Meta has hired other high-profile figures such as Yuanzhi Li from OpenAI and Anton Bakhtin from Anthropic, along with an entire research group from OpenAI last month.
The leadership reshuffle follows a broader strategic shift at Apple. John Giannandrea, once the senior vice president overseeing AI and machine learning, has seen key responsibilities — including the Siri and robotics units — reassigned, according to reports. Apple’s AI efforts are now spearheaded by Craig Federighi, who leads software engineering, and Mike Rockwell, who oversees Siri.
At its June Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled a limited slate of AI features and emphasized new partnerships with OpenAI and Google, highlighting tools like enhanced image generation and code completion in Xcode — tools not built in-house.
But the broader picture is clear: Apple is now confronting the twin challenges of internal uncertainty and external competition at a moment when AI expertise has never been more valuable — and more aggressively courted.
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