Earlier this week, Ruoming Pang, the executive who until recently led Apple’s AI models team, left the company to join Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL.Now, as reported by , we know just what it took to lure him away.An offer Pang couldn’t refuse (and that Apple couldn’t match) According to the report, Meta offered Pang one of the largest packages seen (yet) in the AI brain-poaching wars, with the promise of more than $200 million spread out over multiple years.
As Mark Gurman and Riley Griffin detailed: Given the disproportionate amount, which reportedly exceeds even Apple CEO Tim Cook’s compensation, the company didn’t try to match the offer.In the way it is structured, Pang won’t see the full payout unless he sticks around and the stock performs well, which is common practice in Silicon Valley.Still, it shows just how aggressive Meta is in its push to build out its MSL division.
Interestingly, the $200M figure comes days after Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, downplayed Meta’s recruiting efforts, after OpenAI’s Sam Altman claimed that his researchers were being offered US$100M to jump ship.As reported by , in a recent all-hands meeting, Bosworth said: There may be more to come As reported earlier in the week, Pang’s exit might be just the beginning, as several engineers from his former team are said to be considering offers from Meta or planning exits of their own.Following Pang’s departure, Apple appointed Zhifeng Chen as the new Apple Foundation Models team lead, and introduced a more distributed management structure, with responsibilities split among other senior engineers.
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