Meta Poaches Two More Apple AI Executives

After poaching one of Apple's top artificial intelligence executives with a $200 million pay package to lure him away from the company, Meta has now hired two of his subordinates, Bloomberg reports.

meta ai
Apple's Mark Lee and Tom Gunter are set to join Meta's Superintelligence Labs team, a newly established division tasked with building advanced AI systems capable of performing at or beyond human-level intelligence.

Earlier this month, Ruoming Pang joined Meta. Until recently, he led Apple's foundation models team. Models developed by Pang's team are used for Apple Intelligence features like email summaries, Priority Notifications, and Genmoji. Lee was Pang's first hire at Apple, while Gunter was apparently known as one of the team's most senior members.

Meta has been spending heavily on new staff and engineers to keep up with advancements from OpenAI and Google. Apple is reportedly now offering some engineers raises in an effort to retain them, but they are still substantially less than Meta's offers.

Bloomberg notes that the three departures "reflect the continuing turmoil at the Apple Foundation Models team." Apple is now believed to be considering a major change of strategy by using external models from the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic to power Siri and other ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features due to the shortcomings of its own models.

Apple is simultaneously developing versions with both its own models and third-party technology, and has not yet decided which to use as the foundation for ‌Apple Intelligence‌ beginning next year.

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Top Rated Comments

firstcitazen Avatar
5 hours ago at 08:03 pm
not sure what they are seeing with Apple's AI record.... Shouldn't they go after employees that work for companies that have had successfully deployments?
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Sami13496 Avatar
5 hours ago at 08:26 pm
During the dot-com bubble of the 2000s, investors were throwing money at everyone who could code, even if they didn’t have a solid idea that actually solved a real problem or created value. Money was being thrown everywhere in the hope that something would stick, and to make sure no opportunity was missed at any cost. The reality, however, was that new technology by itself doesn’t create value. Innovations and solutions do. Technology merely enables the development of new innovations and solutions. That’s why I personally feel that this AI boom is similar to the dot-com bubble. It’s an exciting new technology everyone wants to jump into, but very few truly know what’s worth doing with it. In that sense, Apple might actually be smart for not panicking about it.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
breenmask Avatar
5 hours ago at 08:07 pm
company that no one uses AI from poaches AI from another company that no one uses AI from.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
swingerofbirch Avatar
5 hours ago at 08:06 pm
A brain drain from a shallow pond.

What will Tim Cook fill it back up with?
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
TonyC28 Avatar
5 hours ago at 08:10 pm
You guys have done such an awesome job with Siri, here's a boatload of money to come work on our AI.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
IceCool Avatar
5 hours ago at 08:26 pm

That's how they market themselves, but they had been sending Siri recordings to third party contractors to improve the service (which didn't seem to have worked out too well).
Things have happened, yes, but their revenue speaks for itself…

Apple is more private than most, but that doesn’t mean they’re perfect. The Siri “scandal” was just an analytics data collection system that was poorly designed let alone communicated with the end user.

And I think it’s important to note that Apple immediately made the appropriate changes in an update to iOS 13 (13.2 I think) where you could remove your data from their servers as well as the addition of an obvious prompt to enable or disable collection during device setup.

Do I agree that this should have never been an issue? Of course. Do I think Apple should be able to market privacy? Yes. Do I think their claims are true? For the most part, based off of the available data (ie revenue, terms, etc), yes. Do I think it’s 100% private? No.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)