Radhika Parashar
Ruoming Pang from Apple’s foundation models team has quit to join Meta, a Bloomberg report said on July 7, citing sources familiar with the matter. While an official confirmation on the development remains awaited, Pang’s reported exit from Apple will mark a second blow to its AI team in recent days. Earlier in June, a senior Apple researcher Tom Gunter also left the company after eight years of service.
At Apple, Pang and his team of around a hundred engineers, were responsible for designing the language models that back the Apple Intelligence offerings like on-device summarisation and priority notifications among others, the report noted.
The AI and Machine Learning (ML) engineer, at Meta, will reportedly join the Superintelligence Labs unit that was announced by Mark Zuckerberg last week. Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, has been appointed as Meta’s Chief AI Officer following Meta’s acquisition of a 49 percent stake in Scale AI for $14.8 billion last month.
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Along with Apple and Meta, other Big Tech firms including Microsoft and Google are also locking horns among each other to get the best AI talent onto their respective teams. Last April, an analysis of LinkedIn updates by Financial Times indicated that Apple managed to poach over 35 Google employees for its own AI-related teams.
Meta, particularly, has made it to the headlines several times in recent months for being on a hiring spree, scouting for AI experts. Last week, a report by the New York Post claimed that Zuckerberg has offered as much as $300 million to rope-in AI engineers from OpenAI.
As of now, Meta has managed to onboard specialists in the fields of multimodal AI, reasoning, and synthetic data from rival companies at skyrocketing salary packages.
