Meta's AI enticements bear fruit: Key Apple employee poached
Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly offering AI specialists 100 million US dollars and more. Meta has now snapped up an important Apple employee.
Apple Intelligence icon in dark colors: Apple's AI is still not running smoothly.
(Image: Apple)
Meta has apparently succeeded in poaching a key employee from Apple's artificial intelligence team. According to a report by the financial news agency Bloomberg, Ruoming Pang, manager for Apple's foundation models and "Distinguished Engineer" at the iPhone company, will be leaving the company to join Meta's "Superintelligence Group". Meta, or rather its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had previously tried massively to poach AI talent from other companies, allegedly with salaries of 100 million US dollars over several years.
Defeat for Apple's AI
It is not yet clear what Pang will receive for his move. However, his departure is a major blow for Apple. The company has had massive problems making progress with its in-house AI system Apple Intelligence since last year. Apple's basic models are considered to be comparatively poor. AI functions for Siri have been postponed until next year, although they are not even supposed to come close to the voice mode of ChatGPT and co. Most recently, it was even said that Apple wanted to switch entirely to external models such as Anthropic out of frustration with internal developments.
Pang has not been at Apple for very long: he joined the company during the coronavirus pandemic and worked at Google until 2021. According to Bloomberg, the manager is said to have led a team of around 100 people. The team is said to be behind the models that enable the writing tools, Genmoji and other AI services such as summaries. It is not yet clear who Pang's successor will be. According to Bloomberg, it could be Zhifeng Chen. However, Apple seems to want to change the entire team structure. Internally, the group is called AFM, which stands for "Apple Foundation Models".
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A lot of money from Meta?
Apple recently announced that it would be opening up its models to developers and their apps for the first time. However, there was no storm of enthusiasm. Internally, the Foundation Models team is said to have been under pressure recently after Apple restructured the entire department, writes Bloomberg. Apparently, software boss Craig Federighi is not yet sure how to proceed. This uncertainty also includes Pang's departure.
The personnel decision is likely to be the biggest personnel setback for Apple's AI project that the company has had to accept since the start of work on Apple Intelligence. Pang can now look forward to significantly more money at Meta. Another member of Pang's team, Tom Gunter, is said to have left the group before his boss.
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