Meta has hired two more key members of Apple’s AI foundation models team after recently poaching one of the iPhone maker’s top AI researchers.
Bloomberg reports that Meta has hired Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, who are among the key members of Apple’s Foundation Models (AFM) group. Both engineers will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL) team, which Mark Zuckerberg has been building out by poaching star talent from AI startups like OpenAI.
Lee was the first hire of Apple’s head of the Foundation Models group, Ruoming Pang, who recently joined Meta. Gunter spent eight years at Apple before leaving the company in late June.
Apple loses two more key AI engineers to Meta
Mark Gurman and Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg:
In order to bring long-promised Siri features to market, including the ability to tap into personal data to fulfill queries, Apple is simultaneously developing versions with both its own models and third-party technology. Before the new voice assistant can launch next spring, the company will have to decide on which underlying software to use.
And:
Meta has capitalized on this uncertainty with generous job offers. In many cases, Meta is promising compensation that is several multiples higher than what Apple pays its AFM engineers. In order to prevent more departures, Apple has begun offering some engineers in the group — which includes 100 or so people — raises to stay put.
Meta’s Superintelligence Labs team includes former GitHub head Nat Friedman, Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang and AI startup founder Daniel Gross.
Meta’s blockbuster offers to poach top AI talent
Apple’s counteroffers obviously couldn’t match Meta’s blockbuster pay packages. Earlier this month, Meta poached Ruoming Pang, Apple’s head of foundation models, with a blockbuster pay package said to comprise a $200 million sign-in bonus across several years, among other perks and things like a base salary.
Apple has suffered significant reputational damage with its unfulfilled AI promises, and now Tim Cook and his team are finding that keeping and retaining top AI talent has become very costly.
Apple is known for underpaying top engineers relative to its peers, which doesn’t help its AI efforts at all. The company is in a transitional period, with many members of its executive team now around 60 years old. On top of that, Apple has been coping with talent drain, first in its design department and now in the AI division.
