An Apple artificial intelligence (AI) business executive has moved to Meta, the parent company of Facebook. As the competition for AI talent intensifies, there are concerns that this may disrupt Apple's struggling AI strategy.
Bloomberg reported on the 7th, citing sources, that Luming Fang, the senior engineer overseeing Apple's in-house large language model (LLM) development, has joined Meta. Fang joined Apple from Google in 2021 and has led a team of about 100 people known as the Apple Foundation Model (AFM). This model has been responsible for developing various AI features for Apple, including Apple Intelligence.
Fang will join the newly established Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). According to sources, Meta offered a compensation package worth tens of millions of dollars annually to recruit Fang. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has been intensifying efforts to secure 'AI brains' by hiring key AI talent from major tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google at high salaries.
Fang's departure is not unrelated to Apple's AI strategy. Apple is considering integrating external AI models into Siri, and discussions about utilizing models from OpenAI and Anthropic have reportedly dampened the morale of the AFM team.
Bloomberg noted, 'Fang's move represents the largest loss of an AI talent since Apple began its own AI development, highlighting how intense the competition for talent has become.' It added, 'Meta is offering salaries of tens of millions of dollars annually to some of the world's top engineers, exceeding the amounts Apple pays for engineers performing similar roles.'
Alexander Wang, founder of ScaleAI, Daniel Gross, co-founder of Safe Superintelligence (SSI), and Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, have also moved to Meta, receiving high salaries. Recently, Meta has reportedly brought several researchers from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, including Yuanzi Li.
Google DeepMind has begun defensive measures to prevent talent loss, offering researchers stock compensation of up to several million dollars per person.