There have been several reports regarding senior AI researchers departing from Apple, and the most recent one suggests the issue may be larger than initially thought.
An AI recruitment firm has indicated that there is a lack of confidence within Apple, with tech competitors now viewing it as an opportunity to attract the company’s engineers.
We were informed a month ago that Apple’s leading AI executive, Ruoming Pang, had departed the company to join Meta. Pang transitioned to Apple from Google in 2021 and was in charge of the approximately 100-member team responsible for the models that enable Apple Intelligence features such as Genmoji, Priority Notifications, and on-device text summarization. His departure represents yet another setback for Apple’s initiatives to develop competitive AI models internally.
Bloomberg mentioned at that time that others on his team might follow suit. This indeed turned out to be true less than two weeks later. Just days after hiring Ruoming Pang, who spearheaded Apple’s foundation model initiatives, Meta is reuniting him with two previous colleagues from Cupertino. Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, both significant figures in Apple’s Foundation Models (AFM) group, are joining Meta’s Superintelligence Labs team.
The Financial Times reports today that Apple has now lost about a dozen members of its AI team, including several leading researchers. Apple has witnessed the departure of nearly a dozen of its artificial intelligence personnel, including top researchers, to competitors as the iPhone manufacturer battles to maintain relevance in Silicon Valley’s cutthroat AI talent competition. OpenAI has recruited Brandon McKinzie and Dian Ang Yap, two research engineers from Apple’s foundation models team.
AI recruiting agency Razoroo notes that the exit of Ruoming Pang was a significant setback and has triggered a wave of additional poaching. “Ruoming Pang leaving is monumental: it signals a crisis of confidence regarding future prospects,” stated Aaron Sines, director of AI recruiting at Razoroo. “Many of our client companies are expressing ‘hey, look at Apple: it’s open season’.”
The WSJ indicates that major AI players are collectively gaining more engineers and researchers.
The biggest risk for Apple is that this becomes a self-perpetuating issue. If leading AI talent departs because they perceive the Cupertino company as lagging behind, then Apple forfeits the crucial expertise it requires to close the gap with industry leaders.
The indicated crisis of confidence is likely why CEO Tim Cook convened a company-wide meeting in an effort to reassure the staff.
