Earlier this week, Ruoming Pang, the executive who until recently led Apple’s AI models team, left the company to join Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL. Now, as reported by Bloomberg, we know just what it took to lure him away. An offer Pang couldn’t refuse (and that Apple couldn’t match) According to the report, Meta offered Pang one of the largest packages seen (yet) in the AI brain-poaching wars, with the promise of more than $200 million spread out over multiple years. As Mark Gurman and Riley Griffin detailed: “The compensation packages for hires to Meta superintelligence labs, or MSL, are comprised of a base salary, a signing bonus and Meta shares, with the stock as the weightiest part of the package. The salary and bonus to join are often significant cash payments. In cases where a recruit would have to walk away from significant startup equity to join Meta, the signing bonus may be higher to account for that lost opportunity, the people said.” Given the disproportionate amount, which reportedly exceeds even Apple CEO Tim Cook’s compensation, the company didn’t try to match the offer. In the way it is structured, Pang won’t see the full payout unless he sticks around and the stock performs well, which is common practice in Silicon Valley. Still, it shows just how aggressive Meta is in its push to build out its MSL division. Interestingly, the $200M figure comes days after Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, downplayed Meta’s recruiting efforts, after OpenAI’s Sam Altman claimed that his researchers were being offered US$100M to jump ship. As reported by The Verge, in a recent all-hands meeting, Bosworth said: “Sam is just being dishonest here. (…) He’s suggesting that we’re doing this for every single person… Look, you guys, the market’s hot. It’s not that hot.” There may be more to come As Bloomberg reported earlier in the week, Pang’s exit might be just the beginning, as several engineers from his former team are said to be considering offers from Meta or planning exits of their own. Following Pang’s departure, Apple appointed Zhifeng Chen as the new Apple Foundation Models team lead, and introduced a more distributed management structure, with responsibilities split among other senior engineers. AirPods deals on Amazon