In Bloomberg 's Power On newsletter on July 30, analyst Mark Gurman said that Apple AI researcher Bowen Zhang has decided to join Meta's Superintelligence Lab.
Notably, this is the fourth person in Apple's AI team to leave the company to join the Super Intelligence Lab - a newly established unit to lead Meta's high-level AI development efforts. Among them is Ruoming Pang, who is described as an excellent engineer and manager in charge of Apple's platform modeling group.
Apple's Chaotic AI Future
According to insiders, Zhang is a member of Apple's foundational modeling (AFM) group, which builds the core technology behind the company's AI platform.
The departure was expected after Meta successfully recruited Ruoming Pang. Gurman cited internal sources as saying that some engineers in the AFM group had told colleagues that they were planning to leave in the near future to join Meta. Previously, in June, Tom Gunter, Pang's top "deputy" also left Apple.
According to Gurman, the AFM team is crucial to Apple’s broader AI strategy, working to develop the foundation for Apple Intelligence. However, that plan is on the brink of “bankruptcy” after a series of departures that have left the team in disarray.
Apple's leadership even considered using third-party models, including OpenAI or Anthropic, to help upgrade Siri's AI features.
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In just one month, four Apple AI experts have joined Meta's super intelligence team. Photo: X/@alexa45672. |
Apple representatives met with both companies, proposing to create specialized versions of large language models for testing on private cloud infrastructure.
Some Apple executives see homegrown models as an obstacle to catching up with other rivals in the AI field, according to an insider.
Still, Gurman said Apple's policies have made it harder for its AI team to keep up with competitors.
The iPhone maker has a longstanding commitment to privacy, and often prefers to process AI tasks on-device — rather than in the cloud — so that data doesn’t have to be processed somewhere outside the user’s control. But this approach limits AI capabilities because phone hardware isn’t as powerful as data centers.
Additionally, Apple Intelligence relies heavily on an on-device model with 3 billion parameters, a measure of complexity and learning ability, while other competitors offer cloud-based systems with more than 1 trillion parameters.
Mark Zuckerberg's "Big Game"
According to internal sources, in order to retain talent, Apple has slightly increased salaries for the remaining members of the AFM group. However, this salary is said to be still far lower than competitors, especially Meta.
According to Fortune , billionaire Mark Zuckerberg seems to have personally participated in the recruitment campaign since April after Meta's latest AI model failed to meet expectations. The amount spent by the Facebook founder could be up to $100 million to recruit the best AI talent from OpenAI - the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot.
Previously, Gurman reported that to get Pang, Meta offered a compensation package worth tens of millions of dollars per year. Specifically, Pang's salary package will be more than 200 million USD at Meta and depends on the accompanying conditions.
Although the figure is very high, this compensation package is said to be in line with other talent acquisitions in Meta's "super intelligence" strategy.
The package is broken down into smaller elements, including a base salary and a signing bonus, which is said to be high to account for the employee giving up a large stake in the startup he or she previously worked for.
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Meta continues to recruit talent for its AI mega-project. Photo: Forbes. |
To stay competitive, Zuckerberg is pursuing a grand ambition called “superintelligence,” which involves AI that is more powerful than the human brain. Currently, only a handful of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have the know-how to develop the technology, and Zuckerberg wants Meta to be on the list.
“He’s like a lot of CEOs at big tech companies who think AI is the biggest thing in the world, and they’ll be left behind if they don’t grow in the space,” said Matt Murphy, a partner at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.
Not stopping there, on July 29, Meta continued to appoint Shengjia Zhao, a former scientist at OpenAI and co-founder of the ChatGPT development project, to the position of chief scientist at the Super Intelligence Laboratory.
Zhao's appointment quickly attracted attention in the tech world, especially since Meta already has a talented AI scientist in Yann LeCun.
According to an internal Meta memo, the new lab will aim to build “personal superintelligence for everyone.”
“Shengjia is an outstanding scientist who has recently pioneered the development of a new scaling model. He will lead the scientific direction of our team,” wrote Alexandr Wang, head of the Superintelligence Laboratory.
Source: https://znews.vn/mark-zuckerberg-vung-tien-apple-mat-hang-loat-nhan-tai-post1572955.html
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