Big tech companies seem to be witnessing unprecedented poaching of talent within the industry. A week after Meta poached top AI researchers from rival OpenAI, Apple seems to have lost one of its top AI researchers to Meta. Ruoming Pang, who is said to be one of Apple’s top executives working on AI, has reportedly left the Cupertino-based tech giant to join Meta’s artificial superintelligence unit.
As big tech companies are aggressively competing with each other to capitalise on the ongoing AI boom, the latest exit from Apple has seemingly triggered a ‘tech war’ between the two titans. A report by Bloomberg said that Pang’s departure from Apple on July 7, may have considerably affected the iPhone-maker’s AI ambitions, especially since its flagship Apple Intelligence offerings have already been delayed.
Who is Ruoming Pang?
Pang is a renowned engineer who was reportedly overlooking the development of AI foundational models team at Apple. In 2021, he left Google parent Alphabet to join Apple. He reportedly supervised a team of over 100 engineers tasked with developing AI models for Siri and other on-device features. Pang’s team is said to have been pivotal to Apple’s AI strategy. Back at Google, Pang was reportedly working on large language models (LLMs).
According to Bloomberg, Meta got Pang onboard by offering a package worth ‘tens of millions of dollars per year’. Pang’s exit comes at a time when Zuckerberg has been aggressively poaching AI talent. He has tapped Alexandr Wang of Scale AI and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to steer his ambitious superintelligence group.
Pang holds a master’s in computer science from the University of Southern California and a PhD from Princeton University. When it comes to his stint at Google, as per Pang’s LinkedIn profile, he served as a principal software engineer overseeing the foundational systems across the company. Within Google Brain’s speech recognition efforts, he co-led the development of the Babelfish/Lingvo deep learning framework and contributed to Tacotron 2.
Between 2012 and 2017, he co-founded Google’s global authorisation system named Zanzibar and served as its sole tech lead. Pang also co-developed a search system on Bigtable, which was later adopted by over 1,000 projects. Based on his profile, during his 15 year-long tenure at Google, he was involved in numerous high-impact projects that went on to become integral to Google’s core functions.
Last week, Meta also hired OpenAI researcher Yuanzhi Li and Anthropic’s Anton Bakhtin.
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