Apple loses more AI experts to Meta
Meta's "Superintelligence" project gets even more support from Cupertino: At least a fourth Apple Intelligence employee has been lured.
Apple and Meta logos: apparently many experts come to the Facebook parent company for a lot of money.
(Image: mundissima / Shutterstock)
Mark Zuckerberg's efforts to poach as many artificial intelligence experts as possible from other companies to achieve “superintelligence” more quickly are still going well: according to a report, another employee from Apple's AI team has now been lured to Meta. According to the financial news agency Bloomberg, this is a specialist for multimodal models, i.e., models that can process text as well as images, audio, and video. The ex-Apple employee, who holds a doctorate, is Bowen Zhang, who started out as an expert in machine learning.
Billions for “super intelligence”
It initially remained unclear how much money Meta is paying Zhang – but it is likely to be a multimillion-dollar package consisting of a generous salary plus shares. Zhang's former boss, Ruoming Pang, who was responsible for all the basic models within Apple Intelligence, is said to be able to earn up to 200 million dollars over several years. Meta CEO Zuckerberg had shaken up the AI scene with his enormous salaries, and employees of other AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are now suddenly interested in the so-called Superintelligence Labs at Meta, into which billions are to flow in the coming years.
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In addition to Zhang and Pang, two other ex-Apple employees, Tom Gunter and Mark Lee, are now said to be working at Meta. However, at least one of them worked at another AI company in between. All of them come from Apple's Foundation Models Group, AFM for short. In response, Apple has now increased their salaries, albeit only slightly, as Bloomberg writes. Some are said to have threatened to leave the company.
Pivot from VR to AI
It is not yet possible to predict how successful Meta's project will be. Zuckerberg is currently giving it absolute priority. This is somewhat reminiscent of the efforts for the so-called Metaverse, i.e., VR and AR worlds, which is why Facebook even changed its name to Meta. Meanwhile, however, the business segment seems to have fallen asleep, Meta has not yet reached a mass market with its headsets, and its VR platform Horizon seems to have died out to some extent.
However, the new race towards “superintelligence,” including the group's corresponding pivot in this direction, is considered a world-changing mission. Zuckerberg hopes to improve his AI model, Llama, or alternatively to create entirely new model structures with the new employees. Neither Apple nor Meta commented on the new appointments. It is currently impossible to say how many former Apple AI employees have actually ended up at Meta, so there could be even more than the four known people.
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