Overview

• Ruoming Pang, who led Apple’s 100-person foundation models team, is joining Meta’s Superintelligence Labs with a multimillion-dollar annual offer.
• Apple has placed its foundation models unit under Zhifeng Chen and shifted to a distributed management structure following Pang’s exit.
• Meta has also recruited OpenAI’s Yuanzhi Li and Anthropic’s Anton Bakhtin as part of its broader AI investment strategy.
• The departures come after Apple postponed Siri enhancements promised at WWDC 2024 and restructured its AI efforts under Craig Federighi and Mike Rockwell.
• Reports of low morale and talks of further departures underscore challenges in Apple’s push to build AI capabilities in-house.