On July 7 it was reported that Ruoming Pang, Apple’s top executive in charge of artificial intelligence models is leaving for Meta Platforms, Inc. Now two more Apple AI specialists have defected to the company.
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, reports Bloomberg.
On June 30, it was announced that Tom Gunter, one of Apple’s most senior large language model researchers, had left the company after eight years. Now we know why.
I can’t find much info about Lee. However, both he and Gunter worked closely with Pang.
Bloomberg says Pang, who joined Apple from Alphabet Inc. in 2021, was lured away from Apple with a package worth tens of millions of dollars per year, part of an ongoing effort by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to poach top AI talent from other companies.
At Apple, Pang had reportedly been running a roughly 100-person team responsible for the company’s large language models (LLMs), which underpin Apple Intelligence and other AI features on the company’s devices. Last month Apple said that engineers would be allowed to use open-source models from other companies in its software products as opposed to its own models.
Bloomberg says three departures “reflect the continuing turmoil at the Apple Foundation Models team.” As noted by MacRumors, the tech giant 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.
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