After poaching their boss, Meta hires two more Apple AI researchers with $100 million deals
Meta has poached two more key artificial intelligence researchers from Apple, shortly after hiring their former boss, Ruoming Pang. Notably, Pang, who headed Apple’s large language models team, was recruited by Meta earlier this year with a multi-year compensation package reportedly worth over $200 million.
Following Pang’s move, Meta has now hired Mark Lee and Tom Gunter for its Superintelligence Labs team, the company’s high-profile AI division led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
According to Bloomberg, Lee has already joined Meta after leaving Apple in recent days, while Gunter is set to begin work soon.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken a hands-on role with Superintelligence Labs, particularly after the company’s Llama 4 models struggled to match the competition. In recent months, Meta has intensified a talent war, actively poaching engineers and researchers from Apple, Google, and OpenAI.
These high-profile exits come amid growing turmoil within Apple’s foundation models team, which develops the technology behind the company’s AI features. Reports suggest Apple’s top AI executives are considering using external models to power Siri and other Apple Intelligence features, potentially relying on OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude next year. Such a shift could put the future of Apple’s in-house foundation models team at risk.
Meta leverages Apple’s uncertainty to poach top talent
Meta has reportedly taken advantage of the uncertainty at Apple by making “generous” job offers to key engineers, often offering salaries several times higher than Apple’s packages for foundation engineers.
In response, Apple has started giving raises to around 100 of its top engineers in an effort to retain talent. However, despite these hikes, Meta’s offers remain significantly higher. Bloomberg reports that Gunter, for instance, is part of a cohort receiving multi-year packages worth over $100 million.
Zuckerberg has made it clear he is willing to invest heavily to build Meta’s Superintelligence Labs.
“For our superintelligence effort, I’m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry. We’re also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this,”he wrote in a post on Threads.
