Apple Continues Losing AI Experts to Meta

[kk1ro]

If, like many have already stated, AI/LLM technology has peaked and already entered an age of diminishing returns, Meta's strategy is horrible and they will keep bleeding money like they did with their whole XR/metaverse play.

Apple has always had a tendency to not aggressively pursue trends and only enter a market when they can actually improve upon the state-of-the-art. I think they should still stick to this strategy, even with something as "hot" as AI.

Worst-case scenario, they can keep buying up interesting start-ups/scale-ups that develop in the AI space in an attempt to catch up, or just use the available tech from the leaders in AI.

 

[laptech]

Be an AI expert and get $100 million from Meta but be an expert in any other field, management, financing, hardware design (just to name a few) and get just the going rate for that job. Yeah, I am sure there are going to be many 'expert's' already working at Meta who are going to be royally p....d off at what Zuckerberg is doing. It would not surprise me if we started seeing articles of 'expert' Meta employee's leaving the company because they feel they are being seriously undervalued due to Meta paying AI experts $100 million to join the company.

 

[ralph_sws]

I hope the emoji experts don't leave

 

[macduke]

Make no mistake: There is an arms race right now for human minds so that the wealthy elites can replace human minds with a god created in their own image and they will use it to rule over us and to eventually destroy us. Apple isn’t playing that game. Zuck is.

 

[novagamer]

If, like many have already stated, AI/LLM technology has peaked

It hasn’t peaked. If you haven’t used Grok 3’s voice mode that alone is a major leap, and that company is a mess.

Meta's strategy is horrible and they will keep bleeding money like they did with their whole XR/metaverse play.

Meta does not care about ROI on this, they want the researchers for world models which will obviate current GenAI in ~5 years, and more importantly right now they want to keep those people from continuing to advance their competitors.

It’s a small price to pay to wreck your opposition.

Apple has always had a tendency to not aggressively pursue trends and only enter a market when they can actually improve upon the state-of-the-art. I think they should still stick to this strategy, even with something as "hot" as AI.

Apple launched its most famous line of computers, the iMac, literally because of the emergence of the Web. That also saved the company and started a turn around that continued with the iPod etc.

People tend to forget the iMac was positioned as an easy to use Internet computer for everyone.

AI, like it or not, is an internet-level epochal change.

Worst-case scenario, they can keep buying up interesting start-ups/scale-ups that develop in the AI space in an attempt to catch up, or just use the available tech from the leaders in AI.

They will survive as a platform for quite a while, Apple isn’t going anywhere, but the scale needed for current training and inference means definitionally small startups can’t achieve what well-funded companies can.

There will be advances, maybe some breakthrough will reduce costs by orders of magnitude, but regardless Apple needs researchers to stick around for the good of their company.

 

[Kottu]

“I didn’t realise Apple disliked Meta that much—otherwise, they would’ve tried to keep them.”

 

[cjsuk]

Good for you! Too bad not everyone is that morally straight.

On the other hand, everyone mines everyone's privacy now, you have to be quite tech-savvy and paranoid to avoid that.

It's not like OpenAI is using child labor or producing toxic waste by rare-earth mineral mining, or something. That's Apple's prerogative. But hey, their PR is better than OpenAI's! Surely, they're a more moral company.

P.S. Apples (lol) to oranges here - 20M in future options is very different from 200M in cash now.

OpenAI, through compute, causes serious environmental issues.

As for the options, yeah true, but there was decent salary on that as well.

 

[iZac]

Spend a Billion to keep a potential competitor from getting their AI system off the ground for a couple of years. Doesn’t even matter if the employees are washing dishes or something. Can’t have Apple gatekeeping AI models like they do the App Store or iTunes before it

 

[Taq'aix]

No worries, once Tim wraps up lunch with the Ted Lasso cast and playing golf with Brad Pitt, he’ll dive right in. 🤡

 

[Puiz]

Maybe if Facebook spends another trillion dollars on AI, they will be able to start fixing the ridiculous bugs crippling their only apps that make them any money.

 

[arkitect]

Apple has AI experts?

Well I think it's nowadays more… "Apple had AI experts?"
🙂

 

[everlast3434]

I hope they get them back! I sit around making Genmojis for anywhere from 8-12 hours per day! It’s so useful! They need more support in this very useful app!

 

[mac-imperator]

I guess Apple's non-compete agreement is trash.

 

[Sami13496]

Talking about bubbles. Meta’s hiring spree of AI experts feels a lot like the investor frenzy during the 2000 dot-com boom: throw money at talent without a clear value-driving innovation in sight. Hiring expertise only makes sense when there’s a breakthrough or solution that actually creates value. So what’s Meta’s? I’m not sure there is one.

If I were Apple, I’d take a different approach. Focus on hiring service designers and true innovators first. Let them figure out the next big thing. Once that vision is clear, finding the right AI experts to bring it to life is the easy part.

 

[neuropsychguy]

Apple had AI experts?

I know you’re being somewhat facetious but Apple’s been doing a ton of AI (machine learning) work for years.

Here are some of the publications people at Apple are on and involved with: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research

 

[AndreaMaietta]

I think apple needs to just use some of their cash which they have a **** ton and buy either perplexity or Claude AI and transform that to new Siri etc

 

[Bodhitree]

It strikes me that Apple wouldn’t be the people whose AI experts I would consider worth hiring…

 

[daniesy]

Wait, wait! Apple has AI experts? Since when? 😮

 

[rhinosrcool]

Federighi doesn't know what to do. He's past his prime. They need someone else. Siri will always suck.

 

[tyranne201]

why pay an individual 200 million when there are people starving in the world?

 

[vantelimus]

It's hard to turn down that type of money. If you are an AI expert you get the goodies. Hopefully Apple rethinks it's compensation position.

If Apple is going to integrate third-party software for its AI offerings, then it doesn't need top AI talent. It appears from the outside that Apple doesn't care to compete in the race to AGI.

Apple executives are being consistent with their past. Apple has never been a company that invents new technology. Historically, they have innovated with available technology and superior design. There are strong opinions on whether Apple can still claim superior design, but those are matters of taste. Neither the stock market nor the consumer market have penalized Apple's current execution.

Meta, on the other hand, is trying to invent AGI. The difference between innovation and invention is why Meta, a company with less than half the revenue of Apple, spends ~20% more on R&D (~$40b over the last 12 months) than Apple (~$32b). By percentage of revenue, Apple spends only ⅓ of what Meta does. Apple doesn't need to spend more to achieve their corporate goals.

If Apple did want to compete on AGI, they could crush all competitors on R&D investment in AI. Apple spends ~$100b (~27% of revenue) per year on stock buybacks. If they reduced that to ~$60b (~15% of revenue), they could have $40b (the same as Meta's total R&D cost) additional to put into research. Of course, they won't do that because 1) they don't have the executive talent; and 2) the stock market would penalize them, heavily.

 

[SoldOnApple]

Facebook has a better revenue model so the company can better afford experts. AI will help target ads better than ever before.

 

[Jerus]

AI researcher ‘turns down $1bn pay offer from Mark Zuckerberg’

Meta founder offers eye-watering packages amid escalating war for talent in Silicon Valley

www.telegraph.co.uk

Sounds like they should have askled for more....

 

[vantelimus]

Siri had a couple employees and was novel and very immature, Anthropic has improved their product dramatically with the main pain point being usage limits, there is already demonstrable value and even preference especially among developers.

Anthropic's last valuation was $61.5b. They are seeking new investment that would put the value at $170b. That's a huge bite to swallow even for Apple.

 

[Fraserpatty]

A fourth Apple artificial intelligence expert has left the company to join Meta, reports Bloomberg. Bowen Zhang, who was on Apple's foundation models team, is the latest employee to abandon Apple for Meta.

The leader of Apple's foundation models group, Ruoming Pang, was one of the first Apple AI researchers to join Meta. Since then, several employees who worked under him have also left for Meta. Meta is aggressively hiring for its Superintelligence Labs, an AI division that's building advanced AI systems capable of performing at or beyond human-level intelligence.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been offering AI engineers massive compensation packages to lure them from other companies, and Pang reportedly received over $200 million. Pay from Meta reportedly includes a high base salary, a signing bonus, and stock awards, and the money offered to Pang exceeds the compensation of almost all Apple employees except for executives. Presumably, the other AI engineers that left Apple have also received offers that Apple isn't willing to match.

Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta had been offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million. Meta has hired engineers and AI experts from Apple, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Bloomberg says Apple is "marginally increasing" the pay of its foundation models team, but is not paying at the level that Meta is.

With Apple losing key employees to Meta, it could continue to struggle to catch up in the AI race. Competitors like Google and Samsung have much more advanced AI features already, and this year, Apple was forced to delay promised Apple Intelligence Siri features until 2026.

Apple has been restructuring its AI teams, with AI efforts now overseen by Apple software chief Craig Federighi and Mike Rockwell, who led Apple Vision Pro development. Rumors suggest that Apple is considering using technology from Anthropic or OpenAI for future AI features, including an LLM version of Siri, rather than its own models.

Apple's discussions to rely on third-party AI technology have reportedly led to falling morale on the foundation models team that is now losing employees to Meta. Multiple engineers are reportedly actively interviewing for jobs at other AI companies, while Apple executives are aiming to reassure team members that it remains committed to in-house AI development.

Article Link: Apple Continues Losing AI Experts to Meta

Lawsuits, bad PR, and now the loss of stolen employees. Apple should not have let Siri languish for so many years. I call it Siri’s revenge. Are we sure they’re not sentient? Ha!