Apple's AI Research Team Suffers High-Profile Departures Amid Competitive Offers from Meta

Apple has lost several AI researchers to Meta, including Bowen Zhang, who joined Apple's foundational model group. Zhang's departure marks the fourth AI researcher to leave Apple in a month. Meta previously offered a $200 million deal to Ruoming Pang, the leader of Apple's foundational model group, and has also hired Tom Gunter and Mark Lee. Apple has responded by increasing salaries in its AI team, but its compensation packages still lag behind competitors.

Apple Inc. has suffered a significant blow to its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts with the departure of four key researchers in a single month. The latest to leave is Bowen Zhang, a multimodal AI researcher who was part of the Apple Foundation Models (AFM) group. Zhang is set to join Meta Platforms Inc.'s superintelligence team, according to sources familiar with the matter [1].

This marks the fourth AI researcher to leave Apple for Meta in the past month. Meta previously lured away Ruoming Pang, the leader of the AFM group, with a compensation package valued at over $200 million [1]. Two other researchers, Tom Gunter and Mark Lee, have also joined Meta [1].

The departures have created uncertainty within Apple's AI team. Pang played a central role in defining the department's roadmap and research direction, and his departure has left the team's future unclear. Additional engineers are actively interviewing for jobs elsewhere, and another team member, Floris Weers, has left for a startup [1].

Apple has responded to the job offers from Meta by marginally increasing the pay of its AFM staffers, whether or not they've threatened to leave. However, the pay levels still pale in comparison with those of rivals [1]. Apple shares declined as much as 1.5% to $210.82, reaching a session low in New York trading. The stock was already down 15% this year through July 28's close [1].

The AFM team is critical to Apple's broader AI strategy, as its work underpins the Apple Intelligence platform, which launched last year. However, Apple is now considering a shift toward using more third-party models for its Siri voice assistant, including OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude models [1]. The company is also working on a competing version based on new AFM models, but the future of the in-house team remains uncertain.

Internally, Apple executives have sought to reassure the team members, emphasizing the importance of their work to the company's AI strategy. However, Apple's commitment to privacy and handling AI tasks on devices, rather than in the cloud, has limited the team's capabilities compared to competitors [1]. Apple Intelligence mostly relies on an on-device model with 3 billion parameters, while competitors offer cloud-based systems with a trillion-plus parameters [1].

The AFM group is now overseen by Zhifeng Chen and reports to Daphne Luong, head of AI research at Apple, who answers to John Giannandrea, senior vice president of AI [1].

References:
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-29/apple-loses-ai-models-engineer-bowen-zhang-to-meta-superintelligence-team
[2] https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3320073/apple-loses-fourth-ai-researcher-month-metas-superintelligence-team?module=top_story&pgtype=homepage
[3] https://www.straitstimes.com/business/companies-markets/apple-loses-fourth-ai-researcher-in-a-month-to-metas-superintelligence-team