Ruoming Pang, the creator of Apple’s Foundation Models team, was the first to leave for Meta.
Apple’s AI models face criticism as it looks to third-party support from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Meta is offering multi-fold compensation and cutting-edge project opportunities to lure top talent.
Apple’s long-term ambitions of stepping up its AI game seem to be facing yet another internal setback. According to the report, the iPhone maker is reportedly losing top talent from its Foundation Models team, the group behind developing the large language models (LLMs) to Meta. For those unknown, Meta has been in the headlines for poaching talent from top tech companies like OpenAI and startups to expand its recently formed Superintelligence team.
SurveyAccording to a Bloomberg report citing sources, at least four prominent engineers have departed Apple in the last month to join Meta. The most important departure came in early June when Ruoming Pang, the creator of Apple’s Foundation Models group, left to join Meta. This move was quickly followed by Tom Gunter and Mark Lee, two of the team’s earliest members. Most recently, Bowen Zhang, who headed Apple’s multimodal systems, has also jumped ship.
According to the report, Zhang oversaw how Apple’s AI system integrates data from various sources such as text, images, and video. These changes come just weeks before the iPhone 17 series debuts.
Also read: E-Aadhaar app to launch soon with QR verification: Here’s what we know
Internally, Apple’s Foundation Models team has faced criticism for the slow progress of Apple Intelligence, the company’s AI tool suite announced at WWDC last year. While Apple has already integrated a few AI functions into Siri and applications, the company is also looking into partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic to supplement its in-house efforts. This raises concerns that Apple’s models may not yet be as capable as competitors such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Meta’s LLaMA models.
Meanwhile, Meta has been aggressively recruiting AI talent from across the industry, reportedly offering compensation packages several times higher than Apple’s. In addition to high pay, Meta’s AI division is luring engineers with the promise of working on cutting-edge, scalable systems at its Superintelligence Lab.
Follow Us
Ashish Singh
Ashish Singh is the Chief Copy Editor at Digit. He's been wrangling tech jargon since 2020 (Times Internet, Jagran English '22). When not policing commas, he's likely fueling his gadget habit with coffee, strategising his next virtual race, or plotting a road trip to test the latest in-car tech. He speaks fluent Geek. View Full Profile
