Meta poaches Apple’s AI teams lead as it focuses on Meta Superintelligence Labs

Meta has poached one of Apple’s key AI executives, Frank Chu, to join Meta Superintelligence Labs as it looks to accelerate its artificial intelligence development.

Chu led Apple’s AI teams focused on cloud infrastructure, training, and search — and now will be joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, Bloomberg reports citing people familiar with the matter.

Chu worked on Apple’s cloud infrastructure used to run large language models on the company’s servers, as well as focused on developing the search capabilities for Apple’s Siri voice assistant and the company’s entertainment services.

At Meta, Chu will work on a new team called MSL Infra that’s responsible for AI infrastructure work, according to Bloomberg. Just last week, it was announced that Meta is planning its fourth restructuring of AI efforts in six months, and is expected to divide its fresh AI unit, Superintelligence Labs, into four groups.

Meta has been continuously poaching top AI talent from its competitors, including three prominent AI researchers from OpenAI and several employees from Apple, including Ruoming Pang, Apple’s distinguished software engineer.

The news follows an internal memo sent to hiring managers that was seen by Bloomberg. The memo explains Meta’s plans to pause hiring across all Meta’s teams.

“In order to responsibly manage our headcount and ensure our open and future roles are aligned with our top priorities, we’re temporarily pausing hiring across all MSL teams, with the exception of business critical roles,” it says.

At the same time, the memo says “Alex’s staff will evaluate any business critical hires on a case by case basis”, referring to former CEO of Scale AI who recently joined Meta, Alexandr Wang, allowing “leadership to thoughtfully plan our 2026 headcount growth, as we work through our strategy.”

Wang has offered a glimpse of what’s considered “critical” for Meta on X, saying that the company is only investing more and more into Meta Superintelligence Labs.

We are truly only investing more and more into Meta Superintelligence Labs as a company. Any reporting to the contrary of that is clearly mistaken.

undefined Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) August 21, 2025