Meta Raids Apple's AI Lab With Big Paychecks—Zuckerberg Bets To Win The AI Race
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) has intensified its AI talent war by hiring two key former Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) engineers, Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, for its Superintelligence Labs team.
The hires come just weeks after Meta poached their former boss, Ruoming Pang, the ex-head of Apple’s large language models team, with a multiyear pay package reportedly worth over $200 million, Bloomberg reported on Friday.
On the same day, Meta hired Yuanzhi Li from OpenAI and Anton Bakhtin, who previously worked on Claude at Anthropic, according to sources.
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Meta’s latest hires mark another step in its aggressive push to expand its superintelligence unit. In June, the company also brought in Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, startup founder Daniel Gross, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, reportedly with generous compensation packages.
Meta recruited seven researchers from OpenAI, including Trapit Bansal and Shuchao Bi, experts in large language models and reinforcement learning. It also hired Jack Rae, a machine learning pioneer, and Huiwen Chang, an image generation specialist, from Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google DeepMind.
Lee recently joined Meta, while Gunter—formerly a distinguished engineer at Apple—is expected to start soon. After leaving Apple, Gunter briefly joined another AI firm, but left that role recently to join Meta. At Apple, both engineers played central roles in the Apple Foundation Models (AFM) team, which develops the company’s core generative AI technologies.
Bloomberg’s report noted Meta capitalizing on internal uncertainty at Apple, where executives are debating whether to rely on third-party models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude for Siri and other Apple Intelligence features. This indecision, coupled with relatively lower compensation, has triggered turmoil and exits from Apple’s AI group, which comprises about 100 employees.
Meta has used this window to recruit aggressively, offering pay packages several times higher than Apple’s standard compensation. Gunter reportedly joins a growing list of AI experts at Meta who receive over $100 million multi-year deals.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently declared AI the company’s top priority and said Meta would invest “hundreds of billions of dollars into compute” to build superintelligence.
Meanwhile, Apple has responded by offering raises to key engineers in the AFM team to retain talent. Still, insiders say those increases pale in comparison to Meta’s offers.
Meta is reportedly rethinking its AI strategy and may adopt a closed system instead of its open-source Behemoth model.
Led by newly appointed Chief AI Officer Wang, Meta’s Superintelligence Lab is exploring this shift as part of early-stage internal discussions. The reconsideration follows internal challenges with Behemoth’s performance, which delayed its release. Meta may still support open models, but could prioritize closed systems in the future.
META Price Action: Meta Platforms shares were down 0.15% at $700.39 at the time of publication Friday, according to Benzinga Pro.
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