Departures keep coming: Next Apple AI expert joins Meta
Mark Zuckerberg had actually decided to stop recruiting quite so aggressively for his AI team. But now comes another Apple newcomer.
Icons from Apple and Meta on an older iPhone: And again Apple loses AI experts.
(Image: Koshiro K/Shutterstock)
Another recruitment success for Meta's "Superintelligence" team: Frank Chu, an expert in AI cloud infrastructure, AI training and AI search, is moving from Apple in Cupertino to Menlo Park. There, he is to work in the "Meta Superintelligence Labs" (MSL) with other former Apple colleagues and existing employees on Mark Zuckerberg's dream of a kind of super AI that will even eclipse general artificial intelligence (AGI). What is interesting about this personnel matter is that the head of Meta had actually announced that he would be scaling back his recruitment campaign. The Facebook parent company has already spent enormous sums, including allegedly up to 200 million US dollars in salary and above all shares for Apple's former AI basic model head Ruoming Pang, which are to flow over several years.
Cloud infra specialist makes his exit
According to a Bloomberg report, Meta had actually planned to "temporarily pause" new hires at MSL, according to an internal memo. The exception would be "business-critical positions". Whether Chu is one of them remains unclear. Chu is one of the people at Apple who ensured that large language models can (also) run in the cloud.
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Apple relies on the so-called private cloud compute model (PCC), in which calculations are carried out on the company's servers, but in such a way that no conclusions can be drawn about user data. Meta is presumably less interested in this type of technology, as the company's main source of income is the marketing of such information. After all, Meta had announced a private processing function for WhatsApp. However, Chu's expertise in the field of AI training should come in handy for the Zuckerberg company.
At least six "high-ranking" Apple AI experts at Meta
Also interesting: Chu was most recently involved in search functions for Apple's much-maligned voice assistant Siri, and he is also said to have helped make entertainment content easier to find. How much money Chu will receive for his departure to Meta initially remained unclear. The company pays its recruits handsomely – Apple has recently increased salaries, but according to rumors, it is hardly close to Zuckerberg's AI war chest. Bloomberg reports that Chu is at least the sixth known Apple AI employee to move over to Meta. Chu is probably the highest-ranking person among them, alongside former basic model head Pang.
He was directly integrated under Apple's head of AI infrastructure Benoit Dupin, who in turn reports to head of AI John Giannandrea, who is said to have lost more and more power recently. Chu is now to work on "Infra" in the MSL team. His new top boss (alongside Zuckerberg) is ex-Scale boss Alexandr Wang. Despite internal concerns that Meta is putting too much money into MSL – and the aforementioned memo that new hires are being considered –, Wang announced last week on X that Meta would be putting "more and more" money into MSL.
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