Meta poaches Apple AI leader in major talent win for Zuckerberg’s Superintelligence Lab

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Courtesy: Reuters photo)

Mark Zuckerberg has pulled off another top-flight coup in Silicon Valley's raging AI talent war by hiring Apple's chief of its foundation model team, Ruoming Pang, to join Meta Platforms' new "Superintelligence" unit, a source with knowledge of the hire confirmed to the Wall Street Journal.

Pang is the initial high-profile defection to Meta's ambitious new AI lab from Apple and said to be receiving a tens-of-millions-of-dollars compensation package. The hiring, first reported by Bloomberg, is a big victory for Meta and a defeat for Apple, which has been in a frantic rush to overhaul its AI offerings but still falls behind the competition.

Zuckerberg's AI arms race

The Superintelligence Lab represents Meta's biggest bet yet on artificial intelligence. Rolled out in the earlier part of this year by the former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, the lab is filling up with a wish list of top researchers hired away from companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.

Meta this week announced 11 new hires in a move Zuckerberg presented as an effort to place the firm at the forefront of building next-generation AI. Some of the new hires are being offered up to $100 million in total pay packages, according to individuals briefed on the offers.

Meta's desperation comes amid internal angst over the muted reaction to its newest AI model, Llama 3, which launched in April. Meta also pushed back a larger follow-up version of the model, fuelling concerns within that Meta was behind competitors such as OpenAI and Google.

A blow to Apple's AI ambitions

Pang's exit comes at a critical juncture for Apple, which has yet to deploy a slate of AI feature enhancements that were years in the making. A renewed Siri based on large language models was promised by mid-2024 but has been delayed indefinitely after executives went on record saying it did not meet the company's quality bar.

Apple has also had missteps in introducing generative AI across its hardware and software platform, while competitors are rolling out chatbots, AI software, and productivity enhancements at a quick clip.

While Apple only recently demonstrated new AI features in iOS, including on-device summarization and enhanced search, analysts argue Apple is still playing it cautious and behind. Losing a high-powered executive like Pang could make things worse.

Meta's shifting AI strategy

Meta's Superintelligence Lab represents a strategic shift from its earlier open-source orientation. While Llama models remain a staple of Meta's public AI efforts, the new lab is focused on building proprietary AI agents capable of performing advanced reasoning, planning, and multimodal tasks.

With bold recruitment and billions of dollars invested, Zuckerberg appears bent on establishing Meta as a front-runner in frontier AI — potentially as full-blown competition for OpenAI and Google DeepMind not just in products, but in research. With the AI arms race in Silicon Valley heating up, Meta's victories are mounting at its competitors' expense — and Apple, this time, is paying for it.