Apple Loses Top AI Leader Ruoming Pang to Meta

Apple Inc. is facing a significant setback in its efforts to build generative AI capabilities with the departure of one of its top artificial intelligence leaders, Ruoming Pang, to rival Meta Platforms Inc. Pang, a distinguished engineer and head of Apple’s foundation models team, is leaving to join Meta’s newly formed superintelligence group. Pang, who joined Apple in 2021 from Alphabet, had been overseeing a team of roughly 100 engineers responsible for its large language models that underpin “Apple Intelligence” features across its devices.

Meta has reportedly offered Pang a compensation package worth tens of millions of dollars annually to secure his services. This move is part of a broader talent acquisition strategy by Meta, which has recently poached several high-profile AI talents, including Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, entrepreneur Daniel Gross, and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Additionally, Meta has brought on Yuanzhi Li, formerly of OpenAI, and Anton Bakhtin from the Claude developer Anthropic, continuing its hiring spree in the AI sector.

Meta has declared AI its top priority, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg deeply involved in building out the company’s AI unit. Zuckerberg is known to personally recruit engineers, hosting them at his homes in Silicon Valley and Lake Tahoe. The company has reorganized its AI division to concentrate on “superintelligence” — AI systems capable of matching or surpassing human-level cognitive tasks — and has committed tens of billions of dollars this year toward AI infrastructure, including chips and data centers.

Pang’s departure comes at a time of internal friction at Apple. Although his team’s foundation models are used in Apple Intelligence features such as Genmoji, email summarization, and the revamped Siri, the company has been exploring third-party AI solutions. Apple has held talks with both OpenAI and Anthropic to power future Siri iterations, reportedly impacting morale within Pang’s team. Apple is leaning heavily on external partners despite publicly touting its in-house AI efforts. At its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, only a few AI features were presented as native innovations, with several reliant on partnerships, including call translation and text analysis powered by OpenAI and Google. Apple’s updated Xcode tool taps into third-party models like Claude and ChatGPT for code completion.

The departure of Pang — considered the most critical AI exit since Apple began developing Apple Intelligence — signals broader turbulence in Cupertino’s AI division. Sources say that Pang’s deputy, Tom Gunter, exited last month, and several engineers within the foundation models team, internally known as AFM, are also planning to leave for Meta or other companies. The AFM group, once under Pang’s direct leadership, will now be led by Zhifeng Chen, with a new hierarchical structure involving multiple managers such as Chong Wang, Zirui Wang, Chung-Cheng Chiu, and Guoli Yin.

Apple’s AI strategy is steered by software head Craig Federighi and Mike Rockwell, the engineering lead behind the Vision Pro and now Siri. Meanwhile, AI research remains under John Giannandrea, who was recently stripped of direct oversight of key AI consumer products amid delays and criticism of Apple’s AI rollout. As the talent war in AI intensifies, Pang’s high-profile defection underscores Apple’s challenges in retaining top minds — and the pressure it’s under to stay competitive against faster-moving rivals like Meta, OpenAI, and Google.