Meta continues its $100M AI talent poaching spree: now it's after Apple

Meta has recently made headlines for poaching top artificial intelligence (AI) talent. First, it targeted OpenAI, and now it's honing in on Apple.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is persuading AI talent from prominent competitors to join its company, boasting of massive signing bonuses and other benefits.

While OpenAI was confident that its valued employees would remain with the company, the AI behemoth lost three prominent AI researchers to Meta in late June.

Earlier that month, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, appeared on a podcast and discussed Meta’s poaching plans.

Altman said that Meta was offering its new employees a massive signing bonus of $100 million.

However, he said at the time that, “none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.” But oh, was he wrong.

Meta successfully poached three of OpenAI’s top AI researchers, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Ziaohua Zhai, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Ruoming Pang leaves Apple for Meta

Now, a beloved engineer and manager responsible for Apple’s foundation models teams has left Apple for greener pastures.

Ruoming Pang, Apple’s distinguished software engineer, has supposedly left the company, according to Bloomberg and people with knowledge of the matter.

After joining Apple in 2021, Pang is leaving the tech giant to join Meta’s superintelligence group, said the outlet’s anonymous sources.

Another report from Bloomberg claimed that Zuckerberg is personally creating a team in the hopes of achieving “superintelligence,” in the form of machines capable of surpassing human capabilities.

Zuckerberg’s grand plans to achieve “superintelligence”

A reportedly frustrated Zuckerberg plans to hire about 50 people and has altered the layout of the company’s Menlo Park headquarters to put the new AI team near his office.

This was confirmed in an internal memo sent to Meta’s team regarding the restructuring of Meta’s AI group.

The team will focus on developing the company’s AI superintelligence and will be led by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data-labeling startup Scale AI, and Nat Friedman, former CEO of Github.

Zuckerberg evidently doesn’t want to lose out on the AI race as Meta’s AI tools fall behind Google and OpenAI.

While some say that Meta’s rise to the top is nearly inevitable due to the sheer depth of the company’s pockets, others have doubts about whether Zuckerberg will succeed, saying Meta’s business model is simply not fit for any meaningful AI innovation.