Meta Offered Apple AI Executive Over $200 Million to Leave

Meta offered one of Apple's top artificial intelligence executives over $200 million to lure him away from the company, Bloomberg reports.

meta ai
Ruoming Pang, who until recently led Apple's foundation models team, departed the company to join Meta's Superintelligence Labs, a newly established division tasked with building advanced AI systems capable of performing at or beyond human-level intelligence.

At Apple, he was in charge of a team with approximately 100 employees that work on Apple's large language models. Models developed by Pang's team are used for Apple Intelligence features like email summaries, Priority Notifications, and Genmoji.

People familiar with the matter speaking to Bloomberg said Meta's offer to Pang includes a substantial base salary, a signing bonus, and a large stock award that forms the majority of the compensation. The full payout is contingent upon performance milestones and continued employment over several years.

Apple apparently did not even attempt to match the offer. The proposed sum significantly exceeds the compensation of all Apple employees, other than that of CEO Tim Cook. Pang's compensation is among the highest ever offered in a corporate setting, rivaling packages for chief executives at major global banks.

In a podcast interview last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta had been offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million to attract top talent: "[Meta] started making these giant offers to a lot of people on our team. You know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that in compensation per year."

Apple has reportedly appointed Zhifeng Chen as the new head of its Foundation Models team and implemented more a distributed management structure, with responsibilities split among several senior engineers.

In addition to Pang, Meta's Superintelligence Labs now includes prominent figures such as former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, AI startup founder Daniel Gross, and Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang.

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Top Rated Comments

gianic Avatar
8 hours ago at 09:42 pm
Disgusting.

Meanwhile pick another profession or job that propelled these people to these levels of compensation and many are just scraping by barely above poverty level.

I'm thinking of teachers, (I am one) but there are so many others that are treated as stepping stones while the corporate greed seems to know no bounds.
Score: 32 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Michael Scrip Avatar
8 hours ago at 09:39 pm
If this guy's AI expertise is worth $200,000,000... then why is Apple's AI not-so-great?

?
Score: 28 Votes (Like | Disagree)
hasanahmad Avatar
9 hours ago at 09:31 pm
We will get few comments here because even the detractors of Apple think this is stupid money for someone in charge of Genmoji division
Score: 15 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Dr Nobody Important Avatar
8 hours ago at 09:43 pm
This is great, he will be paying lots of taxes!! Meta will still fail at their objective.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Bungaree.Chubbins Avatar
7 hours ago at 10:44 pm

I do not have access to Apple's R&D nor their HR departments. I am judging based on the quality (or lack there of) the work, and the teams inability to deliver something 3 years into the AI boom. Apple is criminally late to the game at this point.
I'm guessing you're judging all of Apple's ML/LLM department based on the fact that Siri is bad? My brother's Toyota Prado blew a gearbox, two transfer cases, and a turbo. Toyota have no good engineers, since they can't make a good vehicle.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
flopticalcube Avatar
8 hours ago at 09:39 pm
Single-handedly bending the Gini coefficient.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)