Meta has poached two extra key synthetic intelligence researchers from Apple, shortly after hiring their former boss, Ruoming Pang. Notably, Pang, who headed Apple’s massive language fashions crew, was recruited by Meta earlier this yr with a multi-year compensation package deal reportedly value over $200 million.
Following Pang’s transfer, Meta has now employed Mark Lee and Tom Gunter for its Superintelligence Labs crew, the corporate’s high-profile AI division led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
In response to Bloomberg, Lee has already joined Meta after leaving Apple in current days, whereas Gunter is about to start work quickly.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken a hands-on position with Superintelligence Labs, significantly after the corporate’s Llama 4 fashions struggled to match the competitors. In current months, Meta has intensified a expertise conflict, actively poaching engineers and researchers from Apple, Google, and OpenAI.
These high-profile exits come amid rising turmoil inside Apple’s basis fashions crew, which develops the expertise behind the corporate’s AI options. Reviews counsel Apple’s prime AI executives are contemplating utilizing exterior fashions to energy Siri and different Apple Intelligence options, probably counting on OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude subsequent yr. Such a shift might put the way forward for Apple’s in-house basis fashions crew in danger.
Meta leverages Apple’s uncertainty to poach prime expertise
Meta has reportedly taken benefit of the uncertainty at Apple by making “beneficiant” job presents to key engineers, typically providing salaries a number of instances larger than Apple’s packages for basis engineers.
In response, Apple has began giving raises to round 100 of its prime engineers in an effort to retain expertise. Nonetheless, regardless of these hikes, Meta’s presents stay considerably larger. Bloomberg stories that Gunter, as an example, is a part of a cohort receiving multi-year packages value over $100 million.
Zuckerberg has made it clear he’s prepared to speculate closely to construct Meta’s Superintelligence Labs.
“For our superintelligence effort, I’m targeted on constructing essentially the most elite and talent-dense crew within the trade. We’re additionally going to speculate a whole lot of billions of {dollars} into compute to construct superintelligence. We have now the capital from our enterprise to do that,”he wrote in a submit on Threads.
