Photograph: Apple
Apple’s AI ambitions take a success as a key govt main its AI mannequin efforts departs the corporate. Meta has efficiently managed to poach Ruoming Pang, who managed Apple’s basis fashions crew.
Meta is forming a brand new superintelligence crew and reportedly providing pay packages of as much as $100 million to draw prime AI expertise.
Apple loses key AI govt to Meta
Ruoming Pang joined Apple from Alphabet in 2021. In recent times, he led Apple’s foundational fashions crew, comprising round 100 staff. The big language fashions developed by his crew energy Apple Intelligence, Genmoji and different AI-powered options on iPhones and Macs.
Bloomberg studies Meta poached Pang by providing a “package deal price tens of tens of millions of {dollars} per yr.” This isn’t the one huge rent Meta made for its superintelligence crew in current weeks. The corporate recruited a number of prime engineers from OpenAI, together with GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang and others. Earlier this week, Meta additionally efficiently poached Anton Bakhtin from Anthropic.
Meta’s AI efforts haven’t gained as a lot traction as these of OpenAI or Google. However the firm goals to vary that by assembling a superintelligence crew full of a number of the brightest minds in AI.
A giant blow to Apple’s AI efforts
Pang’s departure might additional put Apple’s AI efforts in jeopardy. The corporate already lags behind its rivals, with its AI options not being sensible and helpful in each day life. This has even compelled the corporate to delay the launch of next-gen Siri till subsequent yr.
A current report means that whereas Apple is creating its personal AI expertise to boost Siri, it’s also exploring partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic. The corporate wants a backup simply in case its model fails to dwell as much as expectations. However this transfer didn’t go down properly with the Pang’s crew, negatively affecting their morale. His departure might trigger different engineers from the crew to go away Apple as properly.
Following Pang’s exit, the foundational crew at Apple will report back to Zhifeng Chen.
