Ever since Meta made the move into artificial general intelligence (AGI), the tech giant has been dominating the news due to its aggressive poaching of the best AI talent from competing companies.
In its most recent victory as part of the ongoing AI talent battle, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company poached Ruoming Pang, Apple's lead for its foundational models. Pang led the team behind Apple Intelligence, the technology that supports Genmoji, smart notifications, and content summarization, among other features.
Pang, who joined Apple from Alphabet Inc. in 2021, quickly established himself as an influential leader in Apple's AI ranks. His upcoming move to Meta, where he will be paid tens of millions of dollars annually, according to Bloomberg, is seen as a major loss for Apple—just as the company vies to stay competitive with artificial intelligence.
Pang will instead move on to Meta Superintelligence Labs, a division just established by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to push forward on the company's next-gen AI work. The team is led by Alexandr Wang, the former chief executive of Scale AI, and has attracted some of the boldest names in AI, including Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and former researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Apple's internal AI team, AFM (Apple Foundation Models), is said to be suffering discontent within its ranks. The company has also discussed using third-party models, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, to boost Siri—a move that purportedly irked Pang's team. The deputy, Tom Gunter, departed last month, and several engineers are also weighing exits.
As part of the switch, Apple has restructured its AI leadership. The AFM team is now being headed by Zhifeng Chen with backing from managers such as Chong Wang, Zirui Wang, Chung-Cheng Chiu, and Guoli Yin. For broader AI, those responsibilities are divided among Craig Federighi (software), Mike Rockwell (Siri and Vision Pro), and a downgraded John Giannandrea.
Apple made some modest in-house AI advancements at Apple's WWDC 2025 event. Most of the featured goods, from AI call translation to message summaries, were fueled by partnered technologies from OpenAI and Google. Even the new Xcode was relying on external models—such as ChatGPT and Claude—to generate suggestions for code.
Meta has been going big on AI, meanwhile, with billions poured into artificial intelligence—including its recent valuation trade with Scale AI at $29 billion. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is even personally recruiting, hosting top players at his homes and providing sweet deals.
With the addition of Pang, Meta also becomes a more formidable contender in AI, while Apple faces more pressure to step up its own innovation in a field that is increasingly shaping the future of tech.
