In another bold move underscoring its ambitions to dominate the artificial intelligence (AI) frontier, Meta has hired Apple’s head of AI models, Ruoming Pang, marking a high-profile defection that underlines the escalating talent war among Silicon Valley’s tech giants.
Pang’s departure, first reported by Bloomberg, comes at a critical time for Apple as it struggles to keep pace with rivals in developing cutting-edge generative AI systems.
Pang led Apple’s in-house foundation models team, a group of over 100 engineers responsible for training the neural networks powering Apple Intelligence—the company’s newly launched suite of AI features. These include on-device functions such as Genmoji, Priority Notifications, and Mail summarization, all slated to roll out with iOS 18 later this year.
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However, sources familiar with Apple’s AI efforts say the company’s models have failed to keep up with rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Meta itself. Apple has reportedly considered licensing external models to bridge the gap, including options from OpenAI and Anthropic, particularly for its upcoming Siri overhaul.
Pang’s departure may be just the beginning. People with knowledge of Apple’s AI division say other senior engineers could soon follow him out the door, casting further doubt over the company’s internal capacity to lead in the rapidly evolving AI space.
Meta’s Superintelligence Labs: A Magnet for Talent
Pang will now join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, the elite AI division launched by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to accelerate the company’s long-term AI roadmap. Superintelligence Labs has become a destination for elite researchers and engineers, recruiting talent from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and now Apple.
Meta’s Superintelligence Labs is helmed by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, a data labeling startup Meta recently acquired through a $14.3 billion investment. Wang now serves as Meta’s Chief AI Officer. Alongside him is Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub, who will oversee Meta’s AI product strategy and applied research. The team also includes Daniel Gross, Friedman’s longtime business partner and the co-founder of Safe Superintelligence, a high-profile startup that rebuffed Meta’s acquisition offer earlier this year.
The team’s goal is to develop next-generation AI systems capable of multimodal reasoning, natural conversation, and even autonomous decision-making across Meta’s ecosystem.
Meta has reportedly offered compensation packages ranging from $10 million to $100 million for key hires, underlining just how serious Zuckerberg is about building what he’s called a “frontier AI platform”—an end-to-end system that will not only power Meta’s social platforms but also lead in enterprise and developer tools.
For Pang, the move represents both a leap into a more advanced AI environment and a chance to help shape the architecture of Meta’s AI offerings from the ground up.
Pang’s exit also reflects broader cracks in Apple’s AI strategy. While the company has prioritized privacy and on-device intelligence, that approach has limited its ability to deliver the kind of rich, real-time generative AI experiences users now expect. Meanwhile, competitors are racing ahead with large-scale cloud-based models, pushing updates at a blistering pace.
Meta’s poaching of Pang is just the latest in a long line of aggressive hires that illustrate the company’s intent to dominate AI. Earlier this year, it recruited top scientists from Google’s DeepMind, secured researchers from Safe Superintelligence (SSI), and added ex-OpenAI contributors to its AI safety and alignment units.
As Meta assembles what some in the industry have described as the “Avengers of AI,” Apple finds itself facing mounting pressure—not just to ship features, but to retain the talent capable of building them.
While Apple Intelligence will debut later this year in a suite of consumer-facing features, the company’s reliance on third-party AI providers for core capabilities suggests it is still playing catch-up. In contrast, Meta’s Superintelligence Labs is becoming a self-contained AI powerhouse, poised to lead innovation and influence the next wave of AI products across platforms and industries.
Pang’s jump from Apple to Meta may appear as a single hire—but it represents a seismic shift in the battle for AI supremacy. And with Meta aggressively stacking its AI roster, more shakeups are likely to follow.