Apple’s Foundational Models Lead Joins Meta: Report

Ruoming Pang, a ‘distinguished engineer’ and the manager in charge of Apple’s foundational models team, has joined Meta, Bloomberg reported on July 7. The report added that Meta offered a package worth tens of millions of dollars per year to him.  As per Pang’s LinkedIn profile, he began his role as a ‘distinguished software engineer’ at Apple in 2021, after completing his 15-year tenure at Google. At Google, he worked on Google Brain’s speech recognition research and the development of leading deep learning frameworks used by TPUs, the company’s in-house hardware.  In addition to Pang, Bloomberg also reported that the company hired Yuanzhi Li, a researcher from OpenAI, and Anton Bakhtin from Anthropic on the same day.  CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone on a hiring spree, luring top talent from competitors in an attempt to build a team to work on ‘superintelligence’. Meta has reportedly offered signing bonuses reaching up to $100 million.  One of Apple’s other senior executives, Tom Gunter, has also left the company, as reported by Bloomberg last week. Gunter worked at the company for eight years, and the report added that his colleagues see him as “difficult to replace, given his unique skillset”. Furthermore, Apple was also reported to have ‘nearly lost’ the team behind MLX, an open-source machine learning framework designed for Apple’s in-house silicon hardware. However, they made counteroffers after the engineers “threatened” to leave, and eventually retained them.  Apple has been exploring the use of third-party AI models for the latest and upgraded versions of Siri, its virtual assistant on consumer devices, amid these developments.  According to the report, members have indicated internally that they’re unhappy with Apple’s exploration of third-party options, which is creating a perception that they’re responsible for the company’s AI shortcomings.  These employees also said that they could leave for ‘multimillion-dollar packages’ being offered by companies like Meta and OpenAI.