Apple Intelligence is facing continued departures as Bowen Zhang, an engineer from Apple’s foundational models team, joined Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL) last Friday. Zhang follows three other recent hires (Ruoming Pang, Tom Gunter, and Mark Lee) who left Apple for Meta within the past month. Every exit erodes the in-house talent of Apple in regard to the large language models and on-device AI.
High‑Profile Poaching and Escalating Offers
The intensive hiring by Meta shows that it is ready to pursue the top AI talent very aggressively. According to Bloomberg, Meta’s sign-on bonuses have climbed up to a maximum of 200 million dollars for hiring senior researchers such as Pang, the former head of foundational models at Apple. The other individuals who are recruited are AI pioneers at OpenAI and Anthropic, which portends that Meta is willing to make MSL a global leader in AI research.
Impact on Apple’s AI Strategy
Apple has slightly raised more pay of employees of its Apple Foundation Models team to stop the flight. However, these adjustments trail the multihundred‑million‑dollar packages offered by competitors. Industry observers note that Apple’s slower pace in publicly showcasing AI advancements (despite integrating third‑party models like ChatGPT into its ecosystem) has made its researchers vulnerable to external offers. Tom’s Guide described this trend as an internal upheaval, underscoring the firm’s need to clarify its long‑term AI roadmap.
Meta’s Massive Infrastructure Investment
To support its growing team, Meta is scaling up infrastructure, including a planned 1 gigawatt “Prometheus” cloud cluster in Ohio by 2026. This facility will enable the supercomputing demands of frontier AI model training. With such resources and top researchers like Bowen Zhang now on board, MSL is positioned to accelerate the development of next‑generation AI systems.
What Lies Ahead for Apple
The exits can be very disappointing, but Apple, with its deep pockets, can make counteroffers to pick fresh talent. The wider AI projects of the company involve several groups (Siri, on-device intelligence, and services integration) that can possibly fill in the vacuum created with each departure. Nevertheless, Apple is under even greater pressure to come up with innovative AI capabilities next year or continue losing out to other companies on such an important technologically sensitive front.
