Report: Apple’s AI team loses even more employees

Apple has again lost several employees from his team for artificial intelligence, which is supposed to build Apple Intelligence and the improved Siri, to competitors. According to one Financial Times report From Thursday, the number of “approximately a dozen” people who left the group was reached. Previously, the head of the basic models, Ruoming Pang, had immigrated to Metas “Superintelligence” laboratory for a supposedly three-digit million sum. This was followed by two of his once closest employees and at least one fourth person who had previously taken care of multimodal models at Apple. If the report of the FT is correct, the number of departures would have tripled.

Internal and external criticism of Apple’s AI approach

Apple’s AI department has been in turmoil for months. There is massive internal and external criticism of the previous work. So Apple had to admit that a context-sensitive version of his voice assistant will be postponed to the coming year-a “LLM-Siri” in the style of Gemini or Chatgpt’s voice modes may not be seen before 2027. Internally there were surprisingly radical renovation measures for Apple, in which the previous AI boss John Giannandrea (formerly Google) was partially disempowered.

Finally, it was said that Apple could completely give up its basic models and switch to anthropic technology, for example. Meanwhile, competitors such as Meta use Apple’s problems to recruit its employees – equipped with extremely deep pockets. Apple, on the other hand, is said to have only adapted the salaries (or stock packages) only marginally.

Personaler: “hunting season” at Apple

According to the FT report, META not only managed to attract Apple intelligence employees. Other AI companies such as Xai (Grok), the Canadian LLM specialist Cohere or even Chatgpt-Mother Openai were also successful. The campaign has been running at least since the beginning of the year. The basic model researchers Brandon McKinzie and Dian Ang Yap, who are now working at Openai, are said to have been under the previously unknown departures. Liutong Zhou from Apple’s machine learning team is now at Cohere.

According to observers from the personnel industry, the FT quoted, pangs from the Meta was a bad sign. Many companies said: Apple is now a hunting season. Apple boss Tim Cook had a “win” in the AI area last week at an all-handed meeting from the company. Otherwise, however, he relied on internal calming. According to him, the game has not yet been decided, and Apple has never been the first in new technologies in the past. The problem: AI experts who are particularly familiar with basic models are difficult to find. Not only Apple loses employees: According to FT, Microsoft managed to reclaim 20 AI experts from Google Deepmind last month.