Meta hires two more Apple AI researchers after poaching their boss
Meta has reportedly offered significant compensation packages to engineers from Apple, with salaries several times higher than Apple's offers for foundation engineers.
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Meta has recruited two additional artificial intelligence researchers, Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, from Apple. This follows Meta's earlier hiring of Ruoming Pang, who previously led Apple’s large language models team. Pang's move to Meta earlier this year reportedly included a multi-year compensation package exceeding $200 million.
Lee and Gunter will join Meta's Superintelligence Labs team, an AI division led by Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman. Bloomberg reports that Lee has already started at Meta, having left Apple recently, while Gunter is expected to begin work soon.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, has taken a direct role in Superintelligence Labs. Meta has increased its efforts to recruit engineers and researchers from companies including Apple, Google, and OpenAI in recent months.
These departures occur amid reports of internal shifts within Apple’s foundation models team, which develops the technology for Apple’s AI features. Reports suggest Apple's AI executives are considering the use of external models for features like Siri and Apple Intelligence, potentially leveraging OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude next year.
Meta has reportedly offered significant compensation packages to engineers from Apple, with salaries several times higher than Apple's offers for foundation engineers. In response, Apple has increased compensation for approximately 100 of its engineers to retain talent. Bloomberg states that Gunter is part of a group receiving multi-year packages valued at over $100 million.
Zuckerberg has indicated a willingness to invest in Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. In a Threads post, he stated a focus on building a team and investing hundreds of billions of dollars into compute for superintelligence, noting the capital availability from Meta's business.
