Mark Zuckerberg poaches top Apple AI exec for Meta’s 'superintelligence' team

Meta is ramping up its AI ambitions by hiring away one of Apple’s top artificial-intelligence executives. Ruoming Pang, who led Apple’s foundation models team, is leaving the company to join Meta’s new "superintelligence" group, Bloomberg reports.

Pang joined Apple in 2021 after leaving an engineering position at Alphabet. At Apple, he oversaw a team of roughly 100 people working on the large language models behind Apple Intelligence and Siri. His departure marks a major loss for Apple’s AI efforts at a time when the company is under pressure to catch up to rivals like Google and OpenAI.

Meta confirmed Pang’s hiring on Monday. The company reportedly offered him a compensation package worth tens of millions of dollars per year. It’s the latest in a string of high-profile AI hires for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has brought on Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, startup founder Daniel Gross, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and multiple researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic in recent months.

The aggressive hiring spree comes as Zuckerberg repositions Meta around AI, aiming to build “superintelligence” models that can handle tasks as well as — or even better than — humans. Meta has restructured its AI teams to focus on this goal and plans to spend tens of billions of dollars this year on related infrastructure and talent.

At Apple, Pang’s foundation models team has faced internal challenges. Leadership changes have reportedly led to uncertainty about the team’s direction, as Apple considers bringing in third-party models from OpenAI or Anthropic to power a revamped Siri. That shift has reportedly hurt morale on Pang’s team, with more departures potentially on the horizon. His deputy, Tom Gunter, left Apple last month.

Pang’s exit is significant because his group’s models were expected to many of Apple’s upcoming AI features, including Genmoji, email and article summaries, and prioritized notifications. They also underpin the new version of Siri currently in development.

With Pang leaving, Apple’s foundation models team will reportedly be led by senior distinguished engineer (and former Googler) Zhifeng Chen — under a restructured organization that spreads management across several senior engineers.

While Apple’s AI strategy has seen some new features this year, including on-device translation and partnerships with OpenAI and Google, its own models have struggled to match the breakthroughs seen elsewhere. Meta, meanwhile, is betting that hiring top talent like Pang will help it accelerate AI development and catch up with leaders in the field.

The hiring highlights the intensifying battle for AI talent among Silicon Valley giants as the race to develop more advanced, human-like AI systems heats up.