Meta just hired Apple’s head of foundation models

7 hours ago 3

Apple’s top executive overseeing its in-house AI models is leaving the company, and heading to Meta. As reported by Bloomberg, Ruoming Pang is bound to Menlo Park, and joining Mark Zuckerberg’s all-star Meta Superintelligence Labs group, announced last week.

Apple’s AI setbacks just keep on coming

Pang joined Apple from Google in 2021, and had been managing the roughly 100-person team behind the models that power Apple Intelligence features like Genmoji, Priority Notifications, and on-device text summarization.

His exit marks yet another blow to Apple’s efforts to build competitive AI models in-house. Pang is said to have received a multi-million-dollar annual offer from Meta, as part of Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive push to assemble a dream team of AI talent, and he wasn’t the only hire reportedly confirmed today:

“Meta on Monday also hired Yuanzhi Li, a researcher from OpenAI, and Anton Bakhtin, who worked on Claude at Anthropic PBC, according to other people with knowledge of the matter.”

Bloomberg notes that Pang’s group had been central to Apple’s plans for a next-gen Siri experience, even as internal debate reportedly mounted over whether to stick with its own models or embrace third-party options like OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s models.

In recent months, Meta has brought in big names like Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, OpenAI’s Yuanzhi Li, and Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross.

Sources tell Bloomberg that Pang’s departure might not be the last:

“Pang’s departure could be the start of a string of exits from the AFM group, with several engineers telling colleagues they are planning to leave in the near future to Meta or elsewhere, the people said. Tom Gunter, a top deputy to Pang, left Apple last month, Bloomberg reported at the time.”

The AFM team will now be led by Zhifeng Chen. Unlike the previous structure, where most engineers reported directly to Pang, the new hierarchy introduces a more distributed management structure, with multiple managers possibly including Chong Wang, Zirui Wang, Chung-Cheng Chiu, and Guoli Yin.