Meta offered Apple AI manager over $200 million

Meta offered one of Apple’s top artificial intelligence managers over $200 million to lure him away from the company, Bloomberg reports. Ruoming Pang, who until recently led Apple’s Foundation Models team, left the company to join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, a newly formed division tasked with developing advanced AI systems that match or surpass human intelligence.

At Apple, he led a team of around 100 people working on Apple’s large-scale language models. The models developed by Pang’s team are used for Apple Intelligence features such as email summaries, priority notifications, and Genmoji.

People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Meta’s offer to Pang includes a substantial base salary, a signing bonus, and a large stock award, which makes up the bulk of the compensation. The full payout is contingent on performance milestones and several years of continued service.

Highest-paid Meta employee

Apple apparently didn’t even try to match the offer. The proposed amount significantly exceeds the compensation of all Apple employees except CEO Tim Cook. Pang’s compensation is among the highest ever offered at a company, rivaling the salaries of CEOs of major global banks.

In a podcast interview last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta had offered signing bonuses of up to $100 million to attract top talent: “They started making these huge offers to a lot of people on our team.” Something like a $100 million signing bonus, more than that in annual compensation.”

Apple has reportedly appointed Zhifeng Chen as the new head of its Foundation Models team and implemented a more distributed management structure with responsibilities divided among several senior engineers.

In addition to Pang, prominent figures such as former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, AI startup founder Daniel Gross, and Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang now work at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs.