Apple just lost its top AI expert to Meta
What's the story
Apple's top artificial intelligence (AI) executive, Ruoming Pang, is leaving the company for Meta. Pang led Apple's in-house AI modeling team and played a key role in developing features like Genmoji, Priority Notifications, and on-device summarization. His departure is considered a significant setback for Apple's AI ambitions, which have faced internal challenges.
Career highlights
Pang's team was working on next-gen Siri upgrades
Pang, a former Google employee who joined Apple in 2021, led a team of around 100 people. This team was instrumental in building Apple's own foundation models. As per the reports, Pang's unit was also working on next-gen Siri upgrades and core personalization features at Apple.
Team dynamics
Meta is on a hiring spree
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new "superintelligence" team within the company to drive its AI ambitions. The company has already invested billions of dollars to support this team, which is led by Scale AI founder and CEO Alexandr Wang. Other AI leaders include Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Microsoft's GitHub unit; Daniel Gross, ex-CEO of Safe Superintelligence; and several other experts hired from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Team transition
More engineers from Apple likely to leave
Pang's exit comes on the heels of Tom Gunter's departure, another top executive. More engineers from Apple's AFM group (Apple Foundational Models) could leave too, as per reports. The team will now be led by Zhifeng Chen with a flatter organizational structure including managers like Chong Wang and Zirui Wang.
Strategic shifts
Apple's AI strategy now mainly led by these executives
Apple's AI strategy is now mainly led by Craig Federighi (Software chief), Mike Rockwell (Vision Pro engineer, now leading Siri), and John Giannandrea (leads AI research). At Apple's WWDC in June, only a few AI updates were announced. Most major features came from partners like OpenAI and Google instead of Apple's own models.