Apple loses more AI experts to Meta

Mark Zuckerberg’s endeavors to recruit as many experts as possible from artificial intelligence from other companies in order to get to “superintelligence” faster continues to run well: According to a report, another employee from Apple’s AI team has now been attracted to Meta. According to the Financial news agency Bloomberg It is a specialist for multimodal models, i.e. those that can process both text as well as pictures, audio and video. The ex-Apple employee equipped with a doctorate is Bowen Zhang, he started as an expert in machine learning.

Billions for “superintelligence”

How much money Meta Zhang pays remained unclear at first-however, it should be a package of several million US dollars from a generous salary plus shares. Zhang’s former boss, Ruoming Pang, who was responsible for all basic models as part of Apple Intelligence, is said to be able to earn up to $ 200 million over several years. Meta-CEO Zuckerberg had severely mixed up the AI scene with its enormous salary sums, and employees of other AI entries such as Openaai and Anthropic are now suddenly interested in the so-called superintelligence labs at Meta, into which billions are to flow in the coming years.

In addition to Zhang and Pang, two other ex-Apple people, Tom Gunter and Mark Lee, are now to work at Meta. However, at least one of the two made intermediate station at another AI company. All people come from Apple’s Foundation Models Group, AFM for short. There, Apple has now increased salaries in response, if only easily, as Bloomberg writes. Supposedly, some are said to have threatened to leave the company.

Pivot from VR to Ki

How successful METAS project will be cannot be foreged. Zuckerberg currently gives him absolute priority. This is a bit reminiscent of the efforts of the so-called meta-verse, i.e. VR and AR worlds, which is why Facebook had even changed its name to Meta. In the meantime, however, the business area seems to have fallen asleep, Meta has not yet reached a mass market with its headsets and its VR platform Horizon has partly died out.

However, the new race to the “superintelligence” including the corresponding “pivot” of the group in this direction is the world -changing mandate. Zuckerberg hopes to improve his own AI model Llama, alternatively to create completely new model structures with the new employees. Neither Apple nor Meta commented on the personal details that have now become known. How many ex-Apple Ki employees actually landed at Meta cannot currently be said-so it could be more than the four known people.