Meta has hired Apple's AI manager.

Meta has made another critical move in the field of artificial intelligence. Ruoming Pang, one of the leaders of Apple’s large language model development team, accepted Meta’s offer and left the company. Pang joined Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs unit. This development coincided with fluctuations in Apple’s AI strategy.

Meta Acquires Ruoming Pang

Ruoming Pang began his tenure at Apple in 2021, transferring from Alphabet. He led a team of approximately 100 engineers. This team developed the large language models that form the foundation of Apple’s on-device AI technologies. These models form the infrastructure that enables many Apple Intelligence features, such as email summarization, Genmoji generation, smart notification sorting, and more.

Pang’s departure follows some strategic uncertainty within Apple. In recent months, Apple’s decision to consider external AI models like OpenAI or Anthropic for the next version of Siri had caused unrest within the company.

Although the company runs a parallel development process with its own models, this approach has negatively impacted morale within the Apple Foundation Models (AFM) team. Pang’s close colleague Tom Gunter also left Apple last month.

Meta has recently been aggressively hiring in the AI field. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a primary focus at Meta and reportedly offered Pang tens of millions of dollars annually. In the same vein, Meta has brought on numerous prominent figures from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Scale AI.

Meta’s new unit, Superintelligence Labs, includes Pang, Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, entrepreneur Daniel Gross, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, OpenAI researcher Yuanzhi Li, and Anthropic’s Anton Bakhtin, who was involved in the Claude project.

These developments suggest that Meta is vying for senior positions not only in social media and virtual reality, but also in the AI competition. Apple, meanwhile, continues to struggle with leadership losses and a search for strategic direction. A clear timeline for the next version of Siri has yet to emerge.