Meta Poaches Two More Apple AI Executives

After poaching one of Apple's top artificial intelligence executives with a $200 million pay package to lure him away from the company, Meta has now hired two of his subordinates, Bloomberg reports.

Apple's Mark Lee and Tom Gunter are set to join Meta's Superintelligence Labs team, a newly established division tasked with building advanced AI systems capable of performing at or beyond human-level intelligence.

Earlier this month, Ruoming Pang joined Meta. Until recently, he led Apple's foundation models team. Models developed by Pang's team are used for Apple Intelligence features like email summaries, Priority Notifications, and Genmoji. Lee was Pang's first hire at Apple, while Gunter was apparently known as one of the team's most senior members.

Meta has been spending heavily on new staff and engineers to keep up with advancements from OpenAI and Google. Apple is reportedly now offering some engineers raises in an effort to retain them, but they are still substantially less than Meta's offers.

Bloomberg notes that the three departures "reflect the continuing turmoil at the Apple Foundation Models team." Apple is now believed to be considering a major change of strategy by using external models from the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic to power Siri and other ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features due to the shortcomings of its own models.

Apple is simultaneously developing versions with both its own models and third-party technology, and has not yet decided which to use as the foundation for ‌Apple Intelligence‌ beginning next year.