Apple Loses Top AI Executive Ruoming Pang to Meta

Apple Inc. has experienced a significant setback in its artificial intelligence efforts with the departure of its top executive in charge of AI models, Ruoming Pang. Pang, a distinguished engineer and manager of Apple's foundation models team, is leaving the company to join Meta Platforms Inc. Pang, who joined Apple from Alphabet Inc. in 2021, is the latest high-profile hire for Meta's new superintelligence team.

Meta's hiring spree, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has seen the company bring on major AI leaders with high compensation packages. Pang's departure is part of a broader trend of Meta securing top talent in the AI field, including Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, startup founder Daniel Gross, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Meta has also recently hired Yuanzhi Li, a researcher from OpenAI, and Anton Bakhtin, who worked on Claude at Anthropic PBC. These hires underscore Meta's aggressive strategy to build a dominant position in the AI landscape.

At Apple, Pang had been leading a team of approximately 100 people responsible for the company's large language models, which are integral to Apple Intelligence and other AI features on Apple devices. In June, Apple announced that these models would be opened up to third-party developers for the first time, allowing for a range of new iPhone and iPad apps.

However, internally, the foundation models team has faced scrutiny from new leadership, which is exploring the use of third-party models from companies like OpenAI or Anthropic to power a new version of Siri. These internal discussions have reportedly affected morale within the team.

Despite these challenges, Apple has been working on a new version of Siri based on the models developed by Pang’s group. These models also power Apple Intelligence features such as email and web article summaries, Genmoji, and Priority Notifications.

Pang's departure is the most significant in Apple’s AI ranks since the company started working on Apple Intelligence a few years ago. It highlights the intense competition for talent in the AI space. Meta has been offering top engineers compensation packages worth many millions of dollars per year, significantly more than what Apple pays its engineers for similar work.

Pang's exit could signal a wave of departures from the AFM group, with several engineers reportedly planning to leave for Meta or other companies in the near future. Tom Gunter, a top deputy to Pang, left Apple last month.

The foundation models team reports to Daphne Luong, a top deputy to AI senior vice president John Giannandrea. Earlier this year, Giannandrea was sidelined internally, and Siri, robotics, Core ML frameworks, and other consumer product-related teams were stripped from his command. This came after a poor response to Apple Intelligence and frequent delays for new Siri features.

With Pang’s departure, the AFM team will now be run by Zhifeng Chen. The new organizational structure will include multiple managers reporting to Chen, who will then have engineers reporting to them. Possible managers in the new structure include Chong Wang, Zirui Wang, Chung-Cheng Chiu, and Guoli Yin.

Apple’s AI strategy is now primarily overseen by Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software engineering, and Mike Rockwell, who leads engineering for Siri. Giannandrea is in charge of Apple’s AI research arm. At its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple's own AI features were limited, with new features for translating calls and text messages being the main highlights. Other AI features, such as analysis of on-device screenshots and improved image generation, were provided by partners, including OpenAI and Google. The company also introduced a new version of Xcode that can handle code completion by tapping into Claude and ChatGPT.