Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta pays ‘tens of millions of dollars’ to poach top Apple AI exec — adding to murderers’ row of new hires

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has reportedly forked over “tens of millions of dollars” to poach one of Apple’s top artificial intelligence researchers as the tech giant continued to add to a murderers’ row of high-paid talent.

Ruoming Pang, who led the team responsible for developing Apple’s AI models, will become the latest member to join Meta’s new “Superintelligence Lab,” Bloomberg reported, citing sources with knowledge of the matter.

Meta reportedly lured Pang, who had worked at Apple since 2021, with a compensation package “worth tens of millions of dollars per year,” the sources said.

The company also recently hired away researchers Yuanzhi Li from OpenAI and Anton Bakhtin from Anthropic.

In all, Meta has poached more than a dozen top AI researchers since last week, purportedly offering compensation packages worth $100 million or more to win the AI arms race – meaning the company’s total spending on hires could soon surpass $1 billion, if it hasn’t already. 

At least nine of the hires jumped ship from Sam Altman’s OpenAI, with the others coming from Google DeepMind and Amazon-backed Anthropic.

The new hires will be part of the the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs, headed by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. Late last month, Zuckerberg announced that Wang came aboard after Meta invested nearly $15 billion for a 49% stake in the startup.

Other key hires include former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, ex-Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross and former OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal, who played a key role in developing the ChatGPT maker’s AI reasoning models.

“As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight,” Zuckerberg said in an internal message to employees on June 30. The announcement helped push Meta’s stock to an all-time high.

Meta confirmed the hire but declined further comment. Apple did not immediately respond.

Meta’s tactics have miffed Altman, who has publicly grumbled about his billionaire rival targeting OpenAI’s employees with exorbitant packages.

Top Meta executive Andrew Bosworth reportedly pushed back during a recent all-hands meeting, telling employees that Altman was being “dishonest” about the extent of the offers.

At the same time, Meta denied a report from the tech news site Wired that it had offered up to $300 million to some AI talent – numbers that, if true, would dwarf the annual pay of some of the world’s top tech executives.

“Some people have chosen to greatly exaggerate what’s happening for their own purposes,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said at the time.

Meanwhile, the loss of Pang was another setback for Apple, which has struggled to integrate new AI features for its iPhones and other hardware. Pang oversaw roughly 100 employees at Apple.

During Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last month, the company confirmed that its long-teased AI overhaul of the Siri voice assistant still needed more work before it could be released to the public.