Meta poaches yet another AI researcher from Apple

Apple

Apple’s AI ambitions have hit another speed bump. As per a report by Bloomberg, Bowen Zhang, a key member of Apple’s foundation models team (AFM), has left the company to join Meta’s newly formed “Superintelligence” division. Zhang is now the fourth Apple AI researcher to jump ship to Meta in just the last month.

The departures started with the head of foundation models leaving Apple for Meta, followed by two of his core teammates. With Zhang’s exit, it’s clear Meta is actively poaching from Apple’s top-tier AI talent pool. And it couldn’t come at a more awkward time for Cupertino.

Apple’s AFM team is responsible for building the backbone of its generative AI efforts—models that power features like Apple Intelligence and the upcoming revamp of Siri. However, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says Apple has been “marginally increasing” pay for its foundation model engineers, but compensation still lags behind competitors. That pay gap could be fuelling the exodus.

More troubling, Apple is reportedly reconsidering its own in-house models. Internally, there’s talk of powering the new Siri and Apple Intelligence features with third-party LLMs—such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. While a final decision hasn’t been made, this fallback plan is reportedly causing unrest within the AFM team, which now faces an uncertain future.

In parallel, Apple is continuing to develop a new version of Siri powered by its next-gen AFM models. But the fact that Apple is even entertaining outside LLMs suggests internal doubts about its own tech—especially as rivals like Meta, Google, and OpenAI surge ahead in AI innovation.