Ruoming Pang, Apple’s top executive in charge of artificial intelligence models is leaving for Meta Platforms, Inc., reports Bloomberg.
Pang, who joined Apple from Alphabet Inc. in 2021, is the latest big hire for Meta’s new superintelligence group, the article adds, quoting unnamed people “who declined to be named.” Bloomberg says Meta lured Pang away from Apple will a package worth tens of millions of dollars per year, part of an ongoing effort by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to poach top AI talent fro other companies.
At Apple, Pang had reportedly been running a roughly 100-person team responsible for the company’s large language models (LLMs), which underpin Apple Intelligence and other AI features on the company’s devices. Last month Apple said that engineers would be allowed to use open-source models from other companies in its software products as opposed to its own models.
Bloomberg says that Pang’s departure could be the start of a string of exits from the AFM group, with several engineers telling colleagues they’re planning to leave in the near future to Meta or elsewhere.
On June 30, it was announced that Tom Gunter, one of Apple’s most senior large language model researchers, had left the company after eight years. These departures are part of a continuing, disturbing trend.
According to AppleInsider, Apple nearly lost the entire team behind MLX, its open-source machine learning framework optimized for Apple Silicon. Those engineers reportedly threatened to quit, forcing the company to scramble with counteroffers to keep them.
Bloomberg says that with Pang’s departure, the AFM team will now be run by Zhifeng Chen. In a change from a structure under Pang where most of the engineers reported to him directly, there will be a new organizational layout that includes multiple managers reporting to Chen, who will then have engineers reporting to them, the article adds.
Apple’s overall AI strategy is now run primarily by Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software engineering, and Mike Rockwell, who helped create the Apple Vision Pro headset and now leads engineering for Siri.
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