Meta is continuing to strengthen its artificial intelligence (AI) team by hiring two AI researchers who worked at Apple: Mark Lee and Tom Gunter. The duo is joining Meta’s Superintelligence Labs division, following the recent move of their former boss Ruoming Pang, who also left Apple to join Meta.
Mark Lee, who was Pang’s first hire at Apple, has already started at Meta, according to Bloomberg. Tom Gunter will be joining the company soon. He had briefly worked at another AI firm after leaving Apple but has now decided to make the switch to Meta as well.
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These moves are part of Meta’s aggressive strategy to become a leader in AI. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has declared artificial intelligence as the company’s top priority and has committed to investing heavily in talent and infrastructure. He recently said Meta will invest hundreds of billions of dollars in computing resources to build what he calls “superintelligence.” To help push this vision forward, several top AI researchers, including new hires, are working close to Zuckerberg at Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
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Meanwhile, Apple is facing internal challenges. Apple is reportedly exploring the use of external AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude to power Siri and other Apple Intelligence features. Also, to avoid more departures, Apple has started offering raises to AFM engineers to retain them, but the incentives reportedly fall short of what Meta is offering. Gunter, for example, is joining a group of AI experts at Meta who are receiving multiyear packages worth more than 100 million dollars, according to the report.
With each new hire, Meta moves closer to building what Zuckerberg calls “the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry.”
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