Just Announced: Apple’s Lead AI Model Executive Pang Ruoming Leaves for Meta’s Superintelligence Team with a $10 Million Annual Salary}

Meta continues its aggressive talent acquisition, this time targeting Apple.

According to Bloomberg, Pang Ruoming, head of Apple’s foundational AI models and a prominent engineer, is set to leave Apple and join Meta’s newly formed superintelligence team.

Since moving from Google to Apple in 2021, Pang has led Apple’s core AI/ML models, including the development of the AXLearn training framework, pretraining and inference optimization for large language models, and multimodal understanding and generation.

To attract Pang, Meta reportedly offered a compensation package worth tens of millions of dollars annually. Recently, Meta has recruited top AI leaders including Alexandr Wang from Scale AI, Daniel Gros, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Other recent recruits include OpenAI researcher Yuanzhi Li and Anton Bakhtin from Anthropic, who worked on Claude. These moves highlight the fierce competition for top AI talent among tech giants.

Both Apple and Meta declined to comment on these personnel changes.

Netizens are amazed by Meta’s high spending on talent acquisition.

There are concerns about Apple’s AI development status amid these departures.

According to LinkedIn, Pang graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and worked at Google for 15 years before joining Apple.

At Apple, Pang leads a team of about 100 engineers developing core models for Apple’s AI features, including the AXLearn framework, large language model pretraining, and multimodal capabilities.

In June, Apple announced it would open its AI models to third-party developers, allowing apps to directly use Apple’s core models, fostering new iPhone and iPad applications.

Recently, internal discussions at Apple have focused on using third-party models from OpenAI or Anthropic to power a new version of Siri, which has affected team morale.

While Apple explores external AI solutions, it is also developing a new Siri version based on Pang’s team’s models, supporting features like email summaries, web summaries, Genmoji, and prioritized notifications.

The departure of Pang, a key figure in Apple’s AI efforts, underscores the intense talent competition in the AI field. Meta has been offering annual salaries of several million dollars to top engineers, far exceeding Apple’s pay.

Sources say Pang’s exit may trigger a wave of departures from Apple’s foundational models team, with several engineers already planning to move to Meta or other companies. Last month, senior researcher Tom Gunter left after 8 years at Apple.

Following Pang’s departure, Zhifeng Chen will lead Apple’s foundational models team, which will restructure to include multiple managers reporting to Chen, with potential leaders including Chong Wang, Zirui Wang, Chung-Cheng Chiu, and Guoli Yin.

^{Original article link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-07/apple-loses-its-top-ai-models-executive-to-meta-s-hiring-spree}