Meta has hired two more senior engineers from Apple’s AI division, continuing a targeted talent grab just weeks after poaching Ruoming Pang, the former head of Apple’s large language model efforts. Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, both key figures in Apple’s Foundation Models group, are now set to join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs team.
Mark Lee, who was Pang’s first hire at Apple, has already started at Meta. Tom Gunter, a distinguished engineer and one of the most senior members of the group, left Apple last month. He briefly joined another AI startup before accepting Meta’s offer. The hires deepen the reshuffling within Apple’s AI group and highlight Meta’s clear intent: to assemble an elite internal team of AI specialists, starting with talent directly from its rivals.
Pang’s Shadow and Meta’s Recruiting Push
These latest moves reunite the engineers with Pang, who reportedly signed a multiyear compensation package exceeding $200 million. According to Bloomberg, Meta’s offer to Gunter is also in the nine-figure range. These deals reflect Meta’s willingness to pay far above market rates to consolidate its AI leadership.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI the company’s top priority. In a recent post on Threads, he said Meta plans to “invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence,” underscoring both the scale and the urgency of the company’s AI efforts. By placing top AI hires near his own desk in Menlo Park, Zuckerberg has signaled hands-on involvement in building what he called the “most elite and talent-dense team in the industry.”
Turmoil Inside Apple’s AI Division
Bloomberg also reports growing tension inside Apple’s AI teams. Some engineers feel they’ve been blamed for the company’s stalled generative AI rollout. Internally, leadership is still debating whether to build foundational models in-house or lean on third-party options like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude for Siri and other Apple Intelligence features.
The uncertainty has made Apple vulnerable. Meta is offering not just money, but clarity: a team, a direction, and immediate influence over core product development. In contrast, Apple’s AI roadmap remains undecided, which has opened the door for more defections.
Apple has started offering raises to key members of its Foundation Models group, which includes about 100 people. But sources familiar with the matter say those offers come nowhere close to what Meta is putting on the table.
