Meta Offered Apple AI Executive Over $200 Million to Leave

[MacRumors]

Meta offered one of Apple's top artificial intelligence executives over $200 million to lure him away from the company, Bloomberg reports.

Ruoming Pang, who until recently led Apple's foundation models team, departed the company to join Meta's Superintelligence Labs, a newly established division tasked with building advanced AI systems capable of performing at or beyond human-level intelligence.

At Apple, he was in charge of a team with approximately 100 employees that work on Apple's large language models. Models developed by Pang's team are used for Apple Intelligence features like email summaries, Priority Notifications, and Genmoji.

People familiar with the matter speaking to Bloomberg said Meta's offer to Pang includes a substantial base salary, a signing bonus, and a large stock award that forms the majority of the compensation. The full payout is contingent upon performance milestones and continued employment over several years.

Apple apparently did not even attempt to match the offer. The proposed sum significantly exceeds the compensation of all Apple employees, other than that of CEO Tim Cook. Pang's compensation is among the highest ever offered in a corporate setting, rivaling packages for chief executives at major global banks.

In a podcast interview last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta had been offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million to attract top talent: "[Meta] started making these giant offers to a lot of people on our team. You know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that in compensation per year."

Apple has reportedly appointed Zhifeng Chen as the new head of its Foundation Models team and implemented more a distributed management structure, with responsibilities split among several senior engineers.

In addition to Pang, Meta's Superintelligence Labs now includes prominent figures such as former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, AI startup founder Daniel Gross, and Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang.

Article Link: Meta Offered Apple AI Executive Over $200 Million to Leave

 

[hasanahmad]

We will get few comments here because even the detractors of Apple think this is stupid money for someone in charge of Genmoji division

 

[Michael Scrip]

If this guy's AI expertise is worth $200,000,000... then why is Apple's AI not-so-great?

🤔

 

[flopticalcube]

Single-handedly bending the Gini coefficient.

 

[gianic]

Disgusting.

Meanwhile pick another profession or job that propelled these people to these levels of compensation and many are just scraping by barely above poverty level.

I'm thinking of teachers, (I am one) but there are so many others that are treated as stepping stones while the corporate greed seems to know no bounds.

 

[Dr Nobody Important]

This is great, he will be paying lots of taxes!! Meta will still fail at their objective.

 

[Octavius8]

Really $100 millions???????
Impossible.
Plus. Why hire the losers who can’t make a proper Siri since ever???

 

[marinersaptcomplex]

The immense pressure to perform at an impossibly high level when being paid 200 million dollars must be soul crushing.

 

[constantsnags!]

The immense pressure to perform at an impossibly high level when being paid 200 million dollars must be soul crushing.

You can bet his lawyers made damn sure he’d get his bag one way or another, or he wouldn’t have done it. If it sucks in a few months he’ll dip and probably still be set for life.

 

[Bungaree.Chubbins]

Really $100 millions???????
Impossible.
Plus. Why hire the losers who can’t make a proper Siri since ever???

Because that wasn't his job?

 

[KaliYoni]

Betcha Pang gets a lot less out of this deal than he thinks he will….at least Robert Johnson became a music legend for selling his soul to the devil.

 

[Harvey Zoltan]

Why don't they just get AI to work on AI and save a few dollars.

 

[Macaholic868]

The only thing I can’t understand is why anybody would decline that kind of offer. Even if you immensely dislike Zuckerberg, take the money and run (Steve Miller style) !!!!

 

[MacsRgr8]

My word…. AI also seems to stand for Astronomical Inflation….

nVidia is now worth something like $ 4 TRILLION correct?

 

[m1mini]

Not trying to be disrespectful, and I love Apple, but opposed to Google or OpenAI, Apple does not have any AI&ML employee worth spending over 1-5m dollars to poach. YET ALONE 200M? So go Meta I guess, and good for the guy who got poached.

 

[Bungaree.Chubbins]

Not trying to be disrespectful, and I love Apple, but opposed to Google or OpenAI, Apple does not have any AI&ML employee worth spending over 1-5m dollars to poach. YET ALONE 200M? So go Meta I guess, and good for the guy who got poached.

How do you get access to Apple's R&D and HR departments to be able to say that? I'd like to look at that information myself.

 

[Takeo Apple]

Everyone here asking why he is worth it:
- Apple is, yes, at the forefront of AI -> their hardware is the only really competing system against NVIDIA and 512GB Mac Studio is blazing it away - let's see what the next Mac Pro looks like, I think it will smoke most PCs (which the M series computers already do actually)
- the models Apple developed are on-device LLM systems that work for specific tasks. Nobody in the industry is doing this. Apple might not be launching it yet, and waiting for it to be polished out, but this is going to be absolutely bonkers. All "AIs" right now on other systems are in the cloud - you are dependent of their cloud capacity and that you have internet. Apple's system would be completely private and on-device. This is actually a real game changer and they are optimizing the LLM systems towards multi-modularity. You all just don't understand why this is a big thing - and it has nothing to do with Siri
- there are not many people in the space, the best people are hard to get, Zuckerberg's tactic is unorthodox but it works...

 

[m1mini]

How do you get access to Apple's R&D and HR departments to be able to say that? I'd like to look at that information myself.

I do not have access to Apple's R&D nor their HR departments. I am judging based on the quality (or lack there of) the work, and the teams inability to deliver something 3 years into the AI boom. Apple is criminally late to the game at this point.

 

[m1mini]

Everyone here asking why he is worth it:
- Apple is, yes, at the forefront of AI -> their hardware is the only really competing system against NVIDIA and 512GB Mac Studio is blazing it away - let's see what the next Mac Pro looks like, I think it will smoke most PCs (which the M series computers already do actually)
- the models Apple developed are on-device LLM systems that work for specific tasks. Nobody in the industry is doing this. Apple might not be launching it yet, and waiting for it to be polished out, but this is going to be absolutely bonkers. All "AIs" right now on other systems are in the cloud - you are dependent of their cloud capacity and that you have internet. Apple's system would be completely private and on-device. This is actually a real game changer and they are optimizing the LLM systems towards multi-modularity. You all just don't understand why this is a big thing - and it has nothing to do with Siri
- there are not many people in the space, the best people are hard to get, Zuckerberg's tactic is unorthodox but it works...

Then they should've poached a chip guy, Apple does not excel in models, their on device models even in their v26 software suite are bad. Their chips might be top tier, but the software is (unfortunately) trash

 

[tim_apple]

I’m sure Meta will be just as successful at AI as they were with the metaverse. zuck just loves to throw cash in a furnace following the latest fad.

 

[svish]

Looks like Apple is losing a very valuable personnel. But at the same time wonder how Apple Intelligence is in its current form under their leadership.

 

[Bungaree.Chubbins]

I do not have access to Apple's R&D nor their HR departments. I am judging based on the quality (or lack there of) the work, and the teams inability to deliver something 3 years into the AI boom. Apple is criminally late to the game at this point.

I'm guessing you're judging all of Apple's ML/LLM department based on the fact that Siri is bad? My brother's Toyota Prado blew a gearbox, two transfer cases, and a turbo. Toyota have no good engineers, since they can't make a good vehicle.

 

[Takeo Apple]

Then they should've poached a chip guy, Apple does not excel in models, their on device models even in their v26 software suite are bad. Their chips might be top tier, but the software is (unfortunately) trash

The models are on no devices yet. None.

 

[Piggie]

We all need to remember one thing.
And it's a fact that I'm sure even many people here who have worked over the years understand.

It can often be those above you (Managers) that call the shots, set directions, and can constrain/restrict your abilities.
How many time have you heard people commenting that their manager is an idiot, type comments, and you end up, just doing as you are told regardless as it's easier and less stressful than fighting those above you all the time.

Just because person X was unable to do something at one company, does not mean they are not able to do more at another company.

Even at my workplace, we are stuck with a CEO and top management that have been in place for decades, and the company is never going to change or grow whilst these people remain.
They are the ones constraining our company, not the "workforce"

I can only speak of rumours I have heard over the years, but I understand when working in Apple these is a lot of constraint over how things are done.

 

[sehns]

Zuck seriously underestimates how many people would never trust their inner thoughts with Meta AI.

Nobody even trusts Meta for group chats anymore