METAS AI thrilling bear fruit: Important Apple employee recruited

Meta has apparently succeeded in picking up a central employee from Apple’s team for artificial intelligence. According to a report of the Financial news agency Bloomberg Ruoming Pang, Manager for the basic models of Apple (Foundation Models) and “Distinguished Engineer” will leave the company to switch to “Superintelligence Group” in Metas. Meta and his CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously tried massively to pick up AI talents from other companies, allegedly with salary sums of $ 100 million over several years.

Defeat for Apple’s AI

What Pang gets for his change is so far unclear. However, the departure for Apple puts a difficult blow. Since last year, the group has had massive problems to find its own Apple Intelligence with its in-house AI system. Apple basic models are considered comparatively bad. AI functions for Siri have been postponed to the coming year, although they should not even get to Chatgpt and Co.’s language mode. Finally, it was said that Apple wanted to switch from frustration over internal developments to external models such as that of Anthropic.

Pang has not been at Apple for very long: he joined the group in the Corona period, worked on Google until 2021. According to Bloomberg, the manager is said to have managed a team of over 100 people. The team is said to be behind the models, which enable the writing tools, genemoji and other AI services such as the summaries. It is still unclear who becomes pangs. According to Bloomberg, it could be Zhifeng. However, Apple seems to want to change the entire team structure. The group is called AFM internally, which stands for “Apple Foundation Models”.

A lot of money from Meta?

Apple had recently announced that their own models would be opened for the first time for developers and their apps – however, enthusiasm failed. Internally, the basic model team is said to have recently been under pressure after Apple has restructured the entire department, Bloomberg writes. Apparently software chief Craig Federighi is not yet sure how to proceed. Pang’s departure also falls into this uncertainty.

The personnel is likely to be the biggest personnel setback for Apple’s AI project that the group had to accept since the beginning of work on Apple Intelligence. Pang can now look forward to significantly more money at Meta. Another employee from Pang’s team, Tom Gunter, is said to have left the group in front of his boss.