Meta Offers $2 Billion to Lure Apple AI Engineer

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has made a significant move in the AI industry by offering a compensation package exceeding $2 billion to lure Ruoming Pang, a former Apple AI engineer, to join its "superintelligent" team. This package includes a multi-year salary structure that encompasses base salary, signing bonuses, and stock awards, with the latter making up the bulk of the compensation. The stock awards are subject to performance metrics, including company stock price growth, and are expected to vest over a period of more than four years. This strategic move by Meta highlights its aggressive approach to enhancing its AI capabilities by attracting top talent from rival companies.

Ruoming Pang, a seasoned AI expert, has an impressive academic and professional background. He graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University with a degree in computer science and technology in 1998, followed by a master's degree from the University of Southern California in 2000 and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2006. His career includes over 15 years at Google, where he led several groundbreaking projects such as the global unified permission management system Zanzibar, the voice recognition framework Babelfish/Lingvo, and the voice synthesis model Tacotron2. In 2021, Pang joined Apple, where he led the development of the training framework AXLearn and made significant advancements in multimodal AI and language model training and optimization.

Pang's departure from Apple marks a significant loss for the company, which has struggled to meet its AI upgrade promises. Notably, Apple's AI-driven version of its personal assistant, Siri, which was slated for release in mid-2024, has yet to materialize. The company cited internal quality standards as the reason for the delay. Meta's success in recruiting Pang is part of a broader strategy to challenge competitors like Google and OpenAI in the AI race. The company has invested heavily in AI infrastructure, with significant capital expenditures expected in the coming years. However, Meta's aggressive recruitment tactics have raised concerns about the integration of new talent and potential internal conflicts. Despite these challenges, Meta's commitment to becoming a leader in the AI industry is evident in its willingness to offer substantial compensation packages to attract top talent.