Meta hires Ruoming Pang, Apple’s lead on foundational models

Meta hires top Apple AI talent for it's Superintelligence Labs.
Meta is looking to kickstart its AI teams after a string of mishaps. (Picture: Meta)
The top AI executive and 15-year Google veteran was offered «tens of millions» in compensation to join the Superintelligence Labs at Meta.

Pang was in charge of roughly 100 developers making Apple’s Foundational models, powering features the company calls «Apple Intelligence,» and is found in every corner of iOS 26, such as email summaries, notifications and Genmoji — that was all over the latest WWDC 2025.

Bad vibes at Apple
Bloomberg (paywalled) writes that news of Apple considering other models than its in-house ones to power a smarter Siri has impacted the morale at the foundational model team, and MacRumors says that other engineers are also entertaining offers from outside companies.

Pang now joins the «elite» Superintelligence team with expertise on how to make small and light models that can run on a phone, which is obviously helpful to Meta, writes TechCrunch.

Hiring spree at Meta
Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have been on a hiring spree lately, poaching top talent from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Safe Superintelligence, to build its «Superintelligence Labs» after a string of high profile missteps and a general dissatisfaction with how their models were performing.

Sam Altman recently said that this disparate hiring might lead to culture problems and defended OpenAI as the place to be developing Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, also known as superintelligence.

Read more: Bloomberg (paywalled) broke the news, writeups on Reuters, Gizmodo, TechCrunch and MacRumors.

See also: Meta announces completion of «Superintelligence Labs».