Meta Platforms has reportedly offered a staggering compensation package—exceeding $200 million—to lure Ruoming Pang, Apple’s top executive in charge of artificial intelligence models, away from the iPhone maker. Pang’s departure marks a significant blow to Apple’s AI ambitions and underscores the escalating competition among Silicon Valley’s biggest players to secure world-class talent in artificial intelligence.
Ruoming Pang led Apple’s foundation models team, a group of roughly 100 engineers responsible for developing the core language models powering Apple Intelligence features such as email and web article summaries, Genmoji, and Priority Notifications. Pang joined Apple from Alphabet Inc. (Google) in 2021 and quickly became a central figure in Apple’s AI strategy, overseeing the development of on-device AI models that are integral to the company’s privacy-first approach.
Meta’s offer to Pang is part of a broader, aggressive recruitment drive led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has been reshaping Meta’s AI efforts around a new division called Superintelligence Labs. In recent months, Meta has poached several high-profile AI leaders from rivals, including Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, startup founder Daniel Gross, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The compensation packages on offer are unprecedented, with reports indicating that Meta has been willing to pay “tens of millions of dollars per year” to top AI talent—far more than what Apple traditionally offers its engineers. Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed Meta was offering $100 million signing bonuses to attract talent from his company.
For Meta, Pang’s arrival is a coup that could accelerate its ambitions to lead in artificial general intelligence (AGI). Pang brings deep expertise in designing efficient, on-device AI models—an area increasingly important as companies seek to balance privacy, speed, and capability in next-generation AI applications. His move to Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters is expected to bolster the company’s efforts to outpace rivals in the race for AI supremacy.
