Meta Poaches Apple’s Top AI Executive in Multimillion-Dollar Talent Grab

Ruoming Pang, Apple's head of foundation models and a key architect behind its 'Apple Intelligence' features, has defected to Meta's newly formed superintelligence team. The MOVE comes amid an escalating war for AI talent, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally leading recruitment efforts.

Meta secured Pang with a compensation package reportedly worth tens of millions annually—continuing a pattern of high-profile acquisitions that recently included Scale AI's Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. The company also onboarded OpenAI's Yuanzhi Li and Anthropic's Anton Bakhtin this week.

Zuckerberg has reorganized Meta's AI division to prioritize 'superintelligence' development, hosting engineers at his Silicon Valley and Lake Tahoe residences. The aggressive hiring spree underscores Meta's commitment to dominating the AI arms race, even as Apple loses a critical leader in its AI push.