[LOS ANGELES] The top executives responsible for Apple's AI (AI) models are leaving for another set of iPhone manufacturers' struggles with AI efforts: the meta platform.
Ruoming Pang, a well-known engineer and manager of the company's Apple Foundation model team, is off, according to sources with knowledge of the issue. Pang, who joined Apple from Alphabet in 2021, said it was the latest major employment for Meta's new Superintelligence team.
To secure Pang, Meta provided packages worth tens of millions of US dollars a year, sources said. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg employs Scale AI's Alexandre Wang, startup founder Daniel Gross and former Github CEO Nat Friedman with high pay.
Meta (July 7) also hired Openai researcher Yuanzhi Li and Anton Bakhtin, who worked on Claude at the Human PBC.
Meta declined to comment. Apple and Pang did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
In Meta, Zuckerberg has made AI a top priority for the company as they compete to keep pace with rivals such as Openai and Google. Zuckerberg is deeply involved in recruiting the company's AI division, hosting potential recruits at homes in Silicon Valley and Lake Tahoe, often reaching out to potential recruits personally.
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Zuckerberg rebuilt its AI team at the end of June, focusing on “Superintelligence,” or AI technology that allows it to complete tasks more than humans. Meta will spend hundreds of billions of US dollars on AI-related initiatives this year, the company announced. Much of that money is heading towards infrastructure such as data centers and chips.
At Apple, Pang ran a team of about 100 people responsible for the large language model of the company that underpins the capabilities of the company's devices that support Apple Intelligence and other AI capabilities. In June, Apple announced that these models will be open to third-party developers for the first time, enabling the range of new iPhone and iPad apps.
However, internally, the Foundation model team is under scrutiny from new leadership investigating the use of third-party models, including either Openai or humanity. These internal debates have deterred some of the morale of the Foundation Models team, also known as AFM, in recent weeks.
The company has considered moving to a third-party solution to power the new SIRI AI, but is working on a new version of SIRI at the same time, based on a model developed by the Pang group. These models also facilitate the functionality of Apple Intelligence running on Apple devices, such as email and web article summaries, Genmoji, and Priority notifications.
Since the company began working on Apple Intelligence a few years ago, Apple's most important major departure in AI has highlighted the growing competition for talent in emerging spaces. Meta has offered to the world's top engineers worth millions of US dollars a year, much more than what iPhone makers pay to engineers doing similar jobs.
Pang's departure could be the beginning of a series of exits from the AFM group, with several engineers saying their colleagues are planning to leave in the meta or elsewhere in the near future, sources said. Pan's top vice-chairman Tom Gunter left Apple last month, Bloomberg reported at the time.
The Foundation Models team reports to Daphne Luong, the top vice-chairman of AI Senior Vice-Chair John Giannandrea. Earlier this year, Giannandrea was on the sidelines internally and saw Siri, Robotics, Core ML Frameworks and other consumer product-related teams being stripped of his command. It came after a poor response to Apple Intelligence and frequent delays in new SIRI features.
With the departure of Pang, the AFM team will be run by Zhifeng Chen. In changes from the structure under Pang that most engineers report directly to him, there is a new organizational layout that includes multiple managers reporting to Chen. People close to the team have shown that Jeong Wang, Ji Lui Wang, Jeong Chen Chi Wang and Gri In could become managers of the new structure.
Apple's AI strategy is primarily carried out by Craig Federighi, Apple's Head of Software Engineering, and Mike Rockwell, who helps create the Apple Vision Pro Headset and leads Siri engineering. On his side, Giannandorea is in charge of Apple's AI research department. In June, at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple's own AI was only a small show. Introducing a new feature for translating calls and text messages.
Several other AI features, such as analyzing screenshots on the device and improving image generation, were courtesy of partners, including Openai and Google. The company has also rolled out a new version of Xcode that allows you to handle code completion by tapping Claude and ChatGpt. Bloomberg
