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.
Meta’s hiring spree continues
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.
I’m excited to be the Chief AI Officer of @Meta, working alongside @natfriedman, and thrilled to be accompanied by an incredible group of people joining on the same day.
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