one year on
Meta poaches Apple’s head of AI models
Ruoming Pang, who led the team behind Apple Intelligence, joins a growing roster of high-profile AI hires at Meta as Apple’s AI unit faces internal turmoil.
Meta has poached another top AI executive from a rival, hiring Apple’s head of foundation models, Ruoming Pang, Bloomberg reported Monday. Pang will join Meta’s AI superintelligence unit, a unit CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been staffing with leaders from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Safe Superintelligence.
Pang oversaw the training of the on-device AI models powering Apple Intelligence and other features. Apple’s models have struggled to compete with offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Meta, sources said, and the company has reportedly considered licensing third-party models for a planned Siri upgrade.
The move is the latest in a summer talent war that has seen Zuckerberg aggressively raid Silicon Valley’s AI teams.
Sources told Bloomberg that Pang’s departure might be the first of many from Apple’s troubled AI unit.
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
Bloomberg's sources were right: more of Apple's foundation-models researchers followed Pang out within weeks, and Apple leaned on outside models for the Siri rebuild. Pang himself lasted seven months — OpenAI hired him away from Meta in February 2026, his third frontier lab in eight months, which made him the talent war's own unit of measure.
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