Apple’s leading executive responsible for its internal AI models is departing the firm to join Meta. As noted by Bloomberg, Ruoming Pang is set to move to Menlo Park and will become part of Mark Zuckerberg’s elite Meta Superintelligence Labs team, as revealed last week.
### Apple’s AI challenges continue to emerge
Pang transitioned to Apple from Google in 2021 and had been overseeing the approximately 100-member team that supports features like Genmoji, Priority Notifications, and on-device text summarization within Apple Intelligence.
His departure signifies yet another setback for Apple’s goal to create competitive AI models internally. Reports indicate that Pang received a multi-million-dollar annual salary from Meta as part of Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious initiative to gather top-tier AI talent, and he wasn’t the only hire confirmed today:
> “Meta on Monday also brought on Yuanzhi Li, a researcher from OpenAI, and Anton Bakhtin, who contributed to Claude at Anthropic PBC, according to other sources familiar with the situation.”
Bloomberg emphasizes that Pang’s team was pivotal to Apple’s ambitions for a next-gen Siri experience, even amid internal discussions regarding whether to continue using its own models or to turn to third-party options such as OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s offerings.
In recent weeks, Meta has recruited prominent figures like Alexandr Wang from Scale AI, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Yuanzhi Li from OpenAI, and Daniel Gross, CEO of Safe Superintelligence.
Sources inform Bloomberg that Pang’s exit may not be the final one:
> “Pang’s exit could signal the beginning of a wave of departures from the AFM group, with several engineers expressing intentions to leave for Meta or other opportunities soon, the sources mentioned. Tom Gunter, a senior aide to Pang, left Apple last month, Bloomberg reported previously.”
The AFM team will now be headed by Zhifeng Chen. In contrast to the previous framework where most engineers reported directly to Pang, the revised organizational structure introduces a more decentralized management system, with several managers potentially including Chong Wang, Zirui Wang, Chung-Cheng Chiu, and Guoli Yin.
