Meta Offers Apple Manager Tens of Millions to Join AI Team

A week after announcing its new Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) team, complete with 11 new hires poached from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, Meta has continued on its hiring spree, this time with a top Apple executive.

Meta confirmed to Bloomberg late Monday that Ruoming Pang, an engineer and manager in charge of Apple’s AI models, is leaving Apple for Meta. Pang is the latest new hire for MSL, Meta’s team in charge of pursuing superintelligence, or AI that surpasses human intelligence.

Sources told Bloomberg that Meta offered Pang tens of millions of dollars in annual compensation to incentivize him to make the jump from Apple to Meta. According to his LinkedIn page, Pang previously worked at Google for 15 years, leaving in 2021 to join Apple, where he headed a 100-person team responsible for the AI models that underlie Apple Intelligence.

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 41, has lately been on a hiring spree to add more AI talent to Meta’s ranks, personally assembling the MSL team. Zuckerberg has reportedly been reaching out directly to leading AI researchers and engineers and inviting them to meet with him at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe to talk about offers to join Meta.

Zuckerberg aims to make Meta the first company to achieve superintelligence, beating competitors like OpenAI and Google. The accomplishment would allow Meta to bring advanced AI to products like its chatbot and smart glasses.

^{Mark Zuckerberg at Meta Connect, demonstrating a prototype of smart glasses. Photo by Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images}

Zuckerberg said in late May that Meta AI has more than one billion monthly active users across Meta’s family of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The goal is to keep growing Meta AI’s user base before monetizing it with paid recommendations or a subscription service.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, 40, said last month that Zuckerberg had been offering members of his staff “$100 million signing bonuses” and “more than that” in annual compensation as a reason to join MSL, a claim that Meta executives later refuted.

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Meta has successfully poached at least five OpenAI researchers, including Shengjia Zhao, the co-creator of ChatGPT, and Huiwen Chang, the co-creator of ChatGPT’s image generation abilities. Meta has also brought over top talent from other AI giants, like Johan Schalkwyk, a software fellow from Google, and Joel Pobar, an engineer from Anthropic.

OpenAI’s chief research officer, Mark Chen, said in a leaked memo to staff last week that OpenAI would be “recalibrating” compensation in response to the poaching.

Meta has also poured billions into a deal aimed at bringing over top AI talent, with a $14.3 billion investment in AI data training startup Scale AI last month. One term of the deal was that Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang join Meta as its Chief AI Officer and MSL lead. Other unnamed Scale AI employees also joined Meta.Meta employed 76,834 people as of March 31, an 11% year-over-year increase.