Top Apple AI exec jumps ship to Meta, as Zuckerberg’s Superintelligence squad gains steam

Apple has lost one of its most important AI brains to Meta. Ruoming Pang, who led Apple’s in-house AI modeling team behind Apple Intelligence features like Genmoji, Priority Notifications, and on-device summarisation, is headed to Menlo Park to join Meta’s elite Superintelligence Labs. First reported by Bloomberg, the move is another setback for Apple’s already turbulent AI ambitions.

Pang, a Google veteran who joined Apple in 2021, oversaw a roughly 100-person team crucial to developing Apple’s own foundation models — the very models Apple recently chose to supplement with OpenAI’s GPT-4o and potentially others. According to the report, his team had been driving next-gen Siri improvements and core personalisation features. However, internal tensions reportedly mounted over whether Apple should go all-in on its homegrown models or lean more on third-party LLMs.

Meta, meanwhile, is in hiring overdrive. Pang’s deal is said to be in the multi-million-dollar range, and he’s not alone. Meta also hired Yuanzhi Li (ex-OpenAI) and Anton Bakhtin (formerly at Claude-maker Anthropic), as Mark Zuckerberg races to assemble a who’s who of AI talent. Other recent hires include Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Back in Cupertino, things are looking less stable. Pang’s exit follows the departure of Tom Gunter, a top lieutenant, and sources say more engineers from Apple’s AFM group (Apple Foundational Models) could follow. The team will now be led by Zhifeng Chen, with a flatter org structure that includes managers like Chong Wang and Zirui Wang, as per the report.