Apple’s AI efforts have suffered another setback as Meta poached its head of foundation models, Ruoming Pang, but these aren’t the only significant Meta hires.
Mark German reported on Bloomberg that Pang is joining Mark Zuckerberg’s new Meta Superintelligence Labs group, which aims to bring the best AI talent under one roof to work on foundational models.
Pang was leading Apple’s foundation models team, but Meta offered him a package worth tens of millions of dollars per year, according to sources cited by Bloomberges. Pang left Google to join Apple in 2021, leading a 100-person team of engineers that created in-house AI models powering Apple Intelligence features like on-device text summarizations, Genmoji and priority notifications>
Apple loses its head of AI foundation models
Gurman writes:
The major departure, the most significant in Apple’s AI ranks since the company started working on Apple Intelligence a few years ago, underscores the heightened competition for talent in the emerging space. Meta has been making offers to the world’s top engineers worth many millions of dollars per year — significantly more than what the iPhone maker pays its engineers doing similar work.
He speculated that Pang’s departure could trigger a wave of exits from Apple’s foundation models group. “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,” he said. Pang’s top deputy, Tom Gunter, left the iPhone maker last month.
Meta also hired OpenAI researcher Yuanzhi Li, as well as Anton Bakhtin, who worked on Claude at Anthropic, an AI startup that Apple might partner with to use its AI models to power Siri.
Apple has been working on its own foundation models that were supposed to power a more powerful Siri. As you know, Siri has been delayed as Apple discovered that its foundation models weren’t accurate enough. “While the company has explored a move to a third-party solution to power the AI in the new Siri, it has simultaneously been working on a new version of Siri based on the models developed by Pang’s group,” reads the article.
But internally, the foundation models team has come under scrutiny from new leadership, which is exploring the use of third-party models, including from either OpenAI or Anthropic, to power a new version of Siri. Those internal discussions have soured some of the morale on the foundation models team, also known as AFM, in recent weeks.
And:
While the company has explored a move to a third-party solution to power the AI in the new Siri, it has simultaneously been working on a new version of Siri based on the models developed by Pang’s group. Those models also power Apple Intelligence features that run on Apple devices including email and web article summaries, Genmoji and Priority Notifications.
Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs group comprises, among others, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, OpenAI’s Yuanzhi Li, Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang and Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross.