Apple’s top AI executive to join Meta’s superintelligence team

Apple Inc. is losing one of its top artificial intelligence leaders to rival Meta Platforms Inc., marking a significant setback in the iPhone maker’s efforts to build its generative AI capabilities.

Ruoming Pang, a distinguished engineer and head of Apple’s foundation models team, is leaving the company to join Meta’s newly formed superintelligence group, according to sources familiar with the matter. Pang, who joined Apple in 2021 from Alphabet, had been overseeing a team of roughly 100 engineers responsible for its large language models that underpin “Apple Intelligence” features across its devices.

Meta lures Apple’s AI chief with multimillion-dollar offer amid talent war

To secure Pang, Meta reportedly offered a compensation package worth tens of millions of dollars annually. The move adds to a growing list of high-profile AI talent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has poached recently, including Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, entrepreneur Daniel Gross, and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

On Monday, Meta also brought on Yuanzhi Li, formerly of OpenAI, and Anton Bakhtin from the Claude developer Anthropic, continuing a hiring spree that has seen AI talent from leading labs snap up. While Meta declined to comment, Apple, Pang, OpenAI, and Anthropic have not responded to requests for comment.

Meta has declared AI its top priority, with Zuckerberg deeply involved in building out the company’s AI unit. He’s known to personally recruit engineers, hosting them at his homes in Silicon Valley and Lake Tahoe. The company recently reorganized its AI division to concentrate on “superintelligence” — AI systems capable of matching or surpassing human-level cognitive tasks — and has committed tens of billions of dollars this year toward AI infrastructure, including chips and data centers.

Apple’s AI division faces internal struggles as morale dips and departures mount

Pang’s departure comes at a time of internal friction at Apple. Although his team’s foundation models are used in Apple Intelligence features such as Genmoji, email summarization, and the revamped Siri, the company has been exploring third-party AI solutions. Apple has held talks with both OpenAI and Anthropic to power future Siri iterations, reportedly impacting morale within Pang’s team.

Apple is leaning heavily on external partners despite publicly touting its in-house AI efforts. At its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, only a few AI features were presented as native innovations, with several reliant on partnerships, including call translation and text analysis powered by OpenAI and Google. Apple’s updated Xcode tool taps into third-party models like Claude and ChatGPT for code completion.

The departure of Pang — considered the most critical AI exit since Apple began developing Apple Intelligence — signals broader turbulence in Cupertino’s AI division. Sources say that Pang’s deputy, Tom Gunter, exited last month, and several engineers within the foundation models team, internally known as AFM, are also planning to leave for Meta or other companies.

The AFM group, once under Pang’s direct leadership, will now be led by Zhifeng Chen, with a new hierarchical structure involving multiple managers such as Chong Wang, Zirui Wang, Chung-Cheng Chiu, and Guoli Yin.

Apple’s AI strategy is steered by software head Craig Federighi and Mike Rockwell; the engineering lead behind the Vision Pro and now Siri. Meanwhile, AI research remains under John Giannandrea, who was recently stripped of direct oversight of key AI consumer products amid delays and criticism of Apple’s AI rollout.

As the talent war in AI intensifies, Pang’s high-profile defection underscores Apple’s challenges in retaining top minds — and the pressure it’s under to stay competitive against faster-moving rivals like Meta, OpenAI, and Google.

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