Apple’s top executive overseeing its foundation AI models is leaving the company for Meta, in what’s shaping up to be a significant loss for the iPhone maker’s artificial intelligence ambitions. Ruoming Pang, who led Apple’s in-house foundation models team since 2021, has joined Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs group. His departure adds to a growing list of setbacks as Apple struggles to keep pace in the AI talent race.
Pang led a team of around 100 engineers responsible for building the large language models that power Apple Intelligence features such as Genmoji, Priority Notifications, and on-device summarization. His team was also developing a next-generation version of Siri. Pang’s exit now leaves a leadership vacuum at the heart of Apple’s AI efforts, just as internal tensions grow over whether to continue investing in in-house models or rely on external partners liwke OpenAI and Anthropic.
Meta’s AI Dream Team Grows
Pang’s hiring is part of a broader push by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to assemble a top-tier AI research team. According to Bloomberg, Meta offered Pang a compensation package worth tens of millions of dollars annually. The company confirmed the hire on Monday.
In the same report, Bloomberg notes Meta also recruited OpenAI researcher Yuanzhi Li and Anton Bakhtin, who worked on Claude at Anthropic. These moves show Meta is not just investing in infrastructure, but aggressively pursuing the people who can build next-gen AI systems. Zuckerberg has personally led much of the recruiting effort, even hosting top candidates at his homes.
Pang is not the first senior engineer to exit Apple’s AI unit. Last month, Tom Gunter, one of Pang’s deputies, also left the company. Bloomberg reports that several other engineers within the Apple Foundation Models (AFM) group have indicated plans to follow suit, either to Meta or elsewhere.
Internal Restructuring at Apple
Following Pang’s departure, the AFM team will now report to Zhifeng Chen. Unlike the previous flat structure where most engineers reported directly to Pang, the new model introduces a layer of managers. Chong Wang, Zirui Wang, Chung-Cheng Chiu, and Guoli Yin are among those being considered for leadership roles within this revised setup.
Pang’s team had reported to Daphne Luong, a senior leader under John Giannandrea, Apple’s head of AI research. Over the past year, Apple stripped Giannandrea of key responsibilities, moving teams related to Siri and other consumer AI features to Craig Federighi and Mike Rockwell. At the June WWDC, Apple showed limited progress in AI, relying on OpenAI and Google integrations for features like code completion and image generation instead of using its own models.
The departure of Pang, a figure central to Apple’s foundation model strategy, underscores the company’s deepening challenge: holding on to AI talent while its rivals spend heavily and scale fast. As Apple now leans more on third-party partnerships for AI capabilities, the loss of one of its few remaining in-house leaders raises serious questions about its long-term vision.
