Meta' displayed underneath " width="970" height="616" data-caption='Meta is hoping to bolster its A.I. offerings with an aggressive hiring push. <span class="media-credit">Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images</span>'>
Meta is adding yet another top A.I. expert to the company’s rapidly growing roster of talent, much of it plucked from rival firms like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Apple now joins the mix of disgruntled competitors, with researcher Ruoming Pang leaving the iPhone maker to join Mark Zuckerberg’s push toward advanced forms of A.I.
Pang’s new role is with Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), a recently launched team aimed to build A.I. systems more capable than humans. He will work under Alexandr Wang, the co-founder and former CEO of Scale AI, and Nat Friedman, a former CEO of Github. Other MSL hires spearheaded by Zuckerberg include Daniel Gross, who previously led Ilya Sutskever’s startup Safe Superintelligence.
Originally from Shanghai, China, Pang earned his undergraduate degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and went on to complete a master’s in computer science at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in the same field from Princeton in 2006.
This won’t be the first time Pang has been poached. The researcher previously worked at Google for five years, most recently leading its A.I. speech recognition research, before joining Apple in 2021 as a distinguished software engineer.
At Apple, Pang led the foundation model team, which develops the A.I. systems behind Apple Intelligence. Apple’s progress on A.I., however, has been relatively slow compared to its competitors. The company has reportedly considered using models from Anthropic or OpenAI to power a revamped version of its Siri assistant.
By trading in his role at Apple for a position at Meta’s MSL, Pang is set to receive a staggering compensation package that will exceed $200 million over multi years, according to Bloomberg. The outlet reported that such pay packages typically include a base salary, signing bonus and stock, and are in line with those offered to other recent hires at Meta. Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that Zuckerberg’s attempts to recruit OpenAI staffers came with signing bonuses as high as $100 million.
Such eye-popping compensation is far less common at Apple. Besides CEO Tim Cook, who received a total compensation of $74.6 million last year, the company’s top executives all earn under $28 million annually, according to Apple’s most recent proxy filing. For software engineers one tier below Pang’s former role, yearly compensation typically averages around $778,000, according to data from Levels.fyi.
It’s not just recruitment efforts getting a financial boost at Meta. The company, which is “building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry,” also plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute for its superintelligence efforts, said Zuckerberg in a post on Threads yesterday (July 14). To that end, Meta is building out several computing networks to train advanced A.I. models. One of them, called Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026. Another, dubbed Hyperion, is designed to scale up to 5 gigawatts over the next few years.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researchers,” Zuckerberg said, adding that he’s “looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier.”