Apple’s AI ambitions take a hit as a key executive leading its AI model efforts departs the company. Meta has successfully managed to poach Ruoming Pang, who managed Apple’s foundation models team.

Meta is forming a new superintelligence team and reportedly offering pay packages of up to $100 million to attract top AI talent.

Apple loses key AI executive to Meta

Ruoming Pang joined Apple from Alphabet in 2021. In recent years, he led Apple’s foundational models team, comprising around 100 employees. The large language models developed by his team power Apple Intelligence, Genmoji and other AI-powered features on iPhones and Macs.

Bloomberg reports Meta poached Pang by offering a “package worth tens of millions of dollars per year.” This is not the only big hire Meta made for its superintelligence team in recent weeks. The company recruited several top engineers from OpenAI, along with GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang and others. Earlier this week, Meta also successfully poached Anton Bakhtin from Anthropic.

Meta’s AI efforts haven’t gained as much traction as those of OpenAI or Google. But the company aims to change that by assembling a superintelligence team packed with some of the brightest minds in AI.

A big blow to Apple’s AI efforts

Pang’s departure could further put Apple’s AI efforts in jeopardy. The company already lags behind its competitors, with its AI features not being practical and useful in daily life. This has even forced the company to delay the launch of next-gen Siri until next year.

A recent report suggests that while Apple is developing its own AI technology to enhance Siri, it is also exploring partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic. The company needs a backup just in case its version fails to live up to expectations. But this move did not go down well with the Pang’s team, negatively affecting their morale. His departure could cause other engineers from the team to leave Apple as well.

Following Pang’s exit, the foundational team at Apple will report to Zhifeng Chen.