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Meta Offered Apple AI Executive Over $200 Million to Leave
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Well, now, that’s a crazy compensation package for sure.
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
I’m not against AI because I’ve used ChatGPT a little bit.
But the quote about advanced systems to think on a higher level than humans makes me think a lot of people never watched the Terminator movies.
I know, that’s probably been said a number of times, but it is kind of freaky how advanced this AI stuff is going
Anyhow, have a great day if you’re reading this
Meta AI is already head and shoulders above anything Apple has to offer when it comes to AI. I ask my RayBan glasses questions daily and never get the response of "open your iPhone to see your answer" or "Please ask again later", Metas AI is seamless. Take off your Apple oval looking glasses and look at the other technologies around you advancing faster than Apples.
That would enable SkyNet to become self-aware and we all know what happens next…🤓
200 million dollar signing fee is just sick. Especially if 250 million dollar buys you a presidency (according to Elon)
What a world. It truly is the age of the ultra rich.
What a world. It truly is the age of the ultra rich.
Good. Guy obviously doesn't have the talent needed to pull it off. Meta hopefully will get tired of the AI experiment and just give it up when this guy crashes and burns once more.
If this is the case….wonder why Genmoji looks like a mess. An AI engineer made it! (Assuming this is one of their only forté).
Cook seems to have a problem with creatives. 🤣
It is hard to say whether Apple actually lost someone important or frankly, even useful.
Apple maybe venturing into AI or trying to get some resemblance of it working. However, Apple isn’t trying to build a human-level AI intelligence or beyond…. (Just yet).
I feel Apple will start spreading itself too thin if they try to go for more things….unless they have some market-disrupting product in the works that could benefit from it.
They can’t even get baby AI working.
I have 4500 citations in my field*, am I worth $20m?
*mitochondrial biochemistry, so no.
It’s not actually that advanced. LLMs aren’t that much different than predictive text, just much more advanced
They don’t have actual intelligence and they don’t think at all, let alone at a higher level then humans
I think this could be that it cost Meta 2x more to attract ‘top talent’ than OpenAI, and significantly more than it costs Apple. I personally would demand more money from Meta than from Apple, I might not be the only one.
I’m not sure teaching has ever required the ‘teacher’ to be flawless (or even ‘good’ at the subject they teach). Teaching seems to be more about helping others learn the material, in many cases only requiring the teacher to be a day ahead of the students. Have we not encountered the ‘genius’ research professor who is worse than unhelpful at teaching? Teaching might be an independent skill, and it might be that a great teacher can teach a subject they themselves are learning. Could a great teacher even be ignorant of the subject matter, and simply be good at asking questions aware of their own ignorance?
Sounds like there's a lot of conditions to be met before he gets the full amount. And even then a majority of that amount is tied up in stock, which probably comes with a cannot sell before date.
I have no issues with this.
In fact, it's nice to see talent getting rewarded more along the level of the C-Suite, whom I do find to be grossly overpaid very often (usually always).
In fact, it's nice to see talent getting rewarded more along the level of the C-Suite, whom I do find to be grossly overpaid very often (usually always).
Not a chance he’s able to quit and walk away with that money. You think Meta is that stupid?
**** that. You can leave any time and be set for life. I'd feel zero pressure whatsoever.
It's time for Timmy to go. His miserly philosophy has been harming Apple customers for years (butterfly keyboard to save money, removal of free dongles and adapters from products, etc.), and now this parsimonious attitude is going to destroy Apple. You don't put an actuary in charge of product development, but the design team will soon be reporting to Cook. AI is the future, and so far, Apple is in last place. Pathetic.
Wait… the butterfly keyboard is Tim’s fault? He didn’t design it. That was all Jony Ive. Also, the butterfly keyboard didn’t save them any money when they had to offer free warranty replacements and constant reworks of it.