Meta poaches Apple’s AI foundation head as internal rift weakens Cupertino’s generative push, claims report

Ruoming Pang, the executive who led Apple’s AI foundation models team, is reportedly exiting the company to join Meta, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Pang, who came to Apple from Alphabet in 2021, played a key role in developing the large language models behind Apple Intelligence features such as Genmoji, Priority Notifications, and email summaries. His departure follows that of his deputy, Tom Gunter, who also left Apple last month.

Pang is reportedly joining Meta’s newly formed “Superintelligence” division, where he will be part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive push into artificial intelligence. Bloomberg reported that Pang was offered a compensation package worth tens of millions of dollars annually.

Meta has reorganised its AI units under the Superintelligence Labs division and is actively hiring top talent in the field. Recent hires included Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, who now serves as Meta’s Chief AI Officer, along with Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, Yuanzhi Li (from OpenAI), and Anton Bakhtin (from Anthropic). Zuckerberg has reportedly personally led recruitment efforts, even hosting candidates at his homes in Silicon Valley and Lake Tahoe.

“This is one of the most significant AI job changes since the beginning of the generative AI era started a few years ago. Ruoming is Apple’s most respected AI researcher and engineer - and his departure amid Apple’s AI turmoil could have a reverberating impact,” Mark Gurman said in a post on X.

At Apple, Pang’s exit comes as the company considers shifting parts of its AI strategy to rely more on third-party models such as those from OpenAI and Anthropic. Gurman noted that this internal debate has impacted morale on the Apple Foundation Models (AFM) team, with several engineers reportedly planning to leave.

The AFM team, which includes around 100 engineers, will now be led by Zhifeng Chen, Gurman reported. Apple’s broader AI leadership now rests with Craig Federighi, who heads software engineering, and Mike Rockwell, who was instrumental in building the Vision Pro headset and now oversees Siri development. John Giannandrea, previously responsible for Siri and other AI consumer efforts, has seen his role reduced to research.