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Apple Loses Key AI Executive to Meta's Multimillion-Dollar Hiring Spree

coffeemilktea said:
Zuck's been acquiring a lot of AI talent lately. At the rate he's going, Meta might be the biggest player in AI in a year or so... kind of a scary thought... :eek:
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Yes, it seems to be working.

It's exciting in a way, especially for those guys with the crazy salaries.

Anyone care to speculate on what that is? :)
 
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dannys1 said:
Apple is one of the most cash rich companies in the world - i've no idea why they haven't just splashed out on purchasing Anthropic at this point.

Do that - change the privacy policy to match your own and wrap it in macOS and iOS from top to bottom to do anything the user could possibly think of.

iOS can continue to use the on board model for most basic tasks too - as it needs someway to do things offline.
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I think Apple is one of those companies that holds back on pay because they think the prestige of having their name on your resume is worth it. In some areas, and especially in the past, that may have been true, but these days I think they need to open the bank vault and just pay more for key talent.
 
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yeahh but I bet Apple hired all the liquid glass designers from Microsoft...priorities! AI is overblown big time, we just need new icons, everyone knows that ;)
 
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iObama said:
Imagine working at Meta in the year of our Lord 2025.
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I don't know what that even means. Are we supposed to magically read your mind?

nocsi said:
If someone's willing to run away to Meta, it's good riddance. That place has a BBQ restaurant where if you don't audibly say yum after eating it, you get marked. The BBQ being based on Mark's recipes of course. Other Zuck tidbits, he chose his doomsday bunker to be alongside Oprah's. Would you really want to be on a deserted island with Oprah?
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I've worked for companies small and large. When somebody leaves, you'd USUALLY be smart to let them go. But on a couple of occasions, a key person was ready to leave and the company met them halfway with some type of accommodation or another, and that person not only stayed; they were high-contributors, they made a positive difference in their team or in the organization as a whole, and they did not keep thinking or talking about leaving. In each case, money was not the motivator for the person's decision to leave (or for them changing their mind and deciding to stay after all).

Obviously, it's not something you want to keep doing, or people catch on that all they need to do is threaten defection and you'll give them money or bennies to keep them...and you end up losing all control of the ship due to people trying to pocket more cash, benefits, or power.

I worked for one company that kept getting threats from one particular person in the IT group. He was highly protective of his job responsibilities and didn't like sharing knowledge. So whenever he would start talking about leaving, the company knew that they had nobody able to take on his role, and the manager would have to come up with more money or something else to keep this guy from hurting the whole team with his whining and complaining.

What management did NOT know, was that anybody on the team could have taken that guy's role fully with probably only 6 months or so of dedicated effort.

Nobody at Apple (or Meta or any other company) is really all THAT critical. Apple could let them go and still be successful. For Meta's part, they also could probably decide to not make offers to any of the Apple people and still be successful. That's the problem with aggressive headhunting/poaching from your competitor. In the long run, it's not always the REAL ANSWER that you're looking for.
 
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But the problem with all of this is that a lot of analysis say that this will be the downfall of Apple just like what happen to Nokia. All the AI hype all I can see is a chatbot LLM to be honest from an end user experience but who am I to judge right? 😅
 
Apple and AI is like Microsoft thinking the iPhone would never sell. They are too late. At least they can afford to pay for someone else's work. Maybe they can tell Google to keep the billions they get from them, keep Google as the default search and get to use Gemini as well.
 
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Totally understandable, in their position I'd probably leave too.

Parts of Meta are abhorrent but their AI research is probably the best in the world right now, or close to Google's. One of those two are going to be first to whatever is next. Both Google and Meta are keeping a lot of what they're doing close to their chest right now, what we see productized is a very small portion of what we know they're working on.

At this point Apple should probably try to acquire Anthropic and keep them as an independent subsidiary but build deep integration into the OS that other platforms couldn't offer.

The MLX team almost quit last month from what I understand, and that would be a huge loss to Apple. They caved on the salaries there, I think.

Apple needs to move fast on both hardware and software. The AWS-alike rumor is actually aligned with this and a good sign someone knows what they're doing, but the people leaving is questionable, especially with all the internal drama around Siri and the failed AI launches from WWDC24.
 
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Shame on these AI researchers.
Zuckerberg has shown himself to be amoral, actively anti-privacy and anti-consumer over and over again.

He said he was ready to spend $65 billion this year alone to expand AI, and gamble about a decade of profitability. Basically unlimited money to spend on this.

I don't think many realize how terrible it would be for Meta to lead the AI race. Meta is already a societal net negative, and it would be much much worse.
 
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youteonduty said:
it is all about $$$$
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You sure about that? You think (maybe) that's all Zuckerberg cares about?

At this point in the game, I'm not even sure winning is paramount. If it was me, my concerns would be elsewhere.

Of course, logically money is always the answer. Then again....
 
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Macalway said:
Zuckerberg is smart. Do whatever it takes.
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Yep, one of the the most savvy tech CEOs right now, second only to Jensen. Metaverse was a huge misstep but it did get attention off of the scandals. Jobs made some poor decisions too, and Apple also did under Cook with the car project etc.

People who don't follow the research have no idea what the non-product teams at Meta are actually doing, and why smart people would want to work there on technology like this.

Facebook the product and the management of that have been an absolute **** show, and they've had many privacy missteps and decisions they should be held accountable for, honestly similar to what Google did with Chrome and other stuff, but both of these companies are putting their money where it counts in research and if / when we get to an 'iPhone moment' with World Models Apple is going to be dusted.

It's ridiculous to be conservative in these areas right now, especially with the wealth they have. Spin off a new company or fund a "stealth" startup and put all your insanely paid researchers there so other engineers don't get mad but don't just ...not do what's needed to keep them and advance the frontier.

I hate Facebook and haven't used a Meta product since last decade, but I welcome anyone who disagrees with this to come back to this post in 5-10 years and see how much winds up correct. I personally know and have worked with newer-hire researchers at that company, and what they're capable of.

Huge, nearly inconceivable change is coming in the medium-term future. Apple may provide the platform we use to access it, but unless major shifts in leadership and operations happen they won't be contributing much at all to the real work – and there is a non-zero chance that our notion of what a "platform" is might be completely different in a decade, in a way virtually no one can imagine right now.
 
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Meta is desperate to hire from Apple for AI. They can just calm down. They've grabbed enough good people.

Edit: Wait, is this Apple's trojan horse to destroy Meta's AI program?
 
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Would he have really left if Apple was going right? He must have been fed up with Apple’s delusions.
 
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Something perhaps worth mentioning. Just a while ago Apple was a the forefront of crazy innovation, that put them at the very top of the food chain.

It's happening again, and this time the title is up for grabs. Good luck.
 
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michsu said:
That's what you get Apple. You had all the time to make Siri #1..
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When the visionary Scott Forstall was in charge of iOS, Siri was first integrated into iOS with the release of iOS 5 in October 2011. Tim Cook fired Forstall one year later in October 2012.

Had it not been for Cook being so clueless and mediocre by firing Forstall just one year after Siri was released, Siri would’ve likely been far better today, and still an industry-leading technology.
 
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