Meta AI has taken another aggressive step in the AI talent war. This time, it successfully recruited Apple’s top AI executive. Ruoming Pang, who once led Apple’s foundation models team, has now joined Meta AI’s Superintelligence Labs.
To secure Pang, Meta AI offered over $200 million in compensation. This package includes a base salary, a large signing bonus, and stock awards. Notably, most of the compensation depends on performance and staying with the company over time.
At Apple, Pang oversaw around 100 engineers focused on large language models. These models supported Apple Intelligence features like Genmoji and email summaries. Interestingly, Apple chose not to counter the offer. Despite Pang’s importance, Apple made no effort to retain him.
Moreover, Pang’s pay will exceed that of nearly every Apple employee, except CEO Tim Cook. Because of the size of the deal, Pang’s offer ranks among the largest ever given in the tech industry.
Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently commented on Meta AI’s hiring spree. On a podcast, he said Meta had offered engineers up to $100 million just to join. Clearly, Meta AI is pushing hard to win the AI talent race.
So far, the Superintelligence Labs division has brought in other tech heavyweights. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Alexandr Wang have all joined. Together, they plan to develop AI systems that can match or exceed human intelligence.
In response, Apple reorganized its AI leadership. The company promoted Zhifeng Chen and adopted a more distributed management model. Despite that, Pang’s departure signals a major shift in the AI power balance.
Undeniably, Meta AI has changed the landscape by using money and vision to attract top talent. Ultimately, Meta AI is betting big on the future of artificial intelligence—and it’s not slowing down.
For more tech updates, visit DC Brief.
