How Meta steals Apple to form the dream team of AI

General alert at Apple: a fourth generative AI specialist has just left the company to join Meta, the parent company of Facebook. The announcement of Bowen Zhang's departure, a specialist in multimodal AI, could have gone unnoticed if it hadn't been the last of a series that began a few weeks ago.

Indeed, tech giants are engaged in a fierce battle to attract the skills of the best AI engineers. This war has intensified in recent months, and movements between Apple and Meta (still in the same direction) illustrate these tensions. Just before Bowen Zhang, two of his colleagues from the Apple Foundation Models had already chosen to join Meta. Mark Lee and Tom Gunter were two major members of Apple's AI team, and their departure at the beginning and mid-July had already been widely commented on.

And indeed, they followed another highly publicized brain drain, that of Ruoming Pang, who was none other than the former head of the Apple Foundation Models.

Meta is pursuing an aggressive recruitment policy.

Under Mark Zuckerberg's leadership, Meta had already announced through its CEO that it would invest hundreds of billions of dollars to build several AI-focused data centers. Moreover, Zuckerberg himself would be directly involved in some key recruitments, as he would personally oversee the creation of an elite AI division called Superintelligence Labs.

Mark Zuckerberg's words are not the only argument that convinced four talented engineers to leave Apple within two months. Indeed, the sums at stake for the various recruitments would be very significant. Thus, in the case of Ruoming Pang, a package exceeding 200 million dollars is mentioned to attract him to Meta.

Apple and AI: a project that's stumbling?

These salary offers, sometimes presented as « unmatched in Silicon Valley », cannot fully explain this cascade of departures at Apple. Several well-informed observers see this brain drain as additional proof of Cupertino's difficulties in terms of AI strategy and vision. Comparisons with the Titan project (the autonomous car project abandoned by Apple, which reportedly cost 10 billion dollars) are flourishing, although the causes and effects of the difficulties are clearly different from those in the automotive sector.

At the heart of the tensions within the AFM, there would be Apple's strategy that considers using open-source models, or even acquiring a major player such as Perplexity, to accelerate work. Meanwhile, the need to achieve high performance levels while maximizing privacy protection and handling a large number of tasks locally on the iPhone or Mac would also represent a major challenge for engineers.

Apple deploying shields

Rarely pillaged, Apple seems to have decided to react to Meta's attacks. Indeed, in the case of cutting-edge projects such as those within the AFM, it is a matter of relatively small teams, at most a few dozen people. The loss of four elements in record time certainly proves that Apple always knows how to recruit the best talents in the industry, but it is now difficult to retain them. Thus, Cupertino would have agreed to a significant salary increase for the remaining members of the AFM. Now, the team is supervised by Zhifeng Cheng, under the direction of Daphne Luong, Apple's head of AI research, who herself reports to John Giannaandrea, the senior vice president in charge of AI.

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