Report: Apple’s AI team loses even more employees

Apple has once again lost several employees from its artificial intelligence team, which is supposed to build Apple Intelligence and the improved Siri, to competitors. According to a report in the Financial Times on Thursday, the number of people who have left the company has now reached “around a dozen”. Previously, the head of the basic models division, Ruoming Pang, left for Meta’s “Superintelligence” laboratory for an alleged three-digit million sum. He was then followed by two of his once closest colleagues and at least a fourth person who had previously been responsible for multimodal models at Apple. If the FT report is correct, the number of departures would have tripled.

Internal and external criticism of Apple’s AI approach

Apple’s AI department has been in turmoil for months. There has been massive internal and external criticism of its work to date. For example, Apple had to admit that a context-sensitive version of its voice assistant will be postponed until next year – There may be no sign of an “LLM Siri” in the style of Gemini or ChatGPT voice modes before 2027. Internally, Apple has undergone astonishingly radical restructuring measures, with the previous head of AI, John Giannandrea (formerly of Google), being partially ousted.

Most recently, it was even said that Apple could abandon its basic models altogether and switch to Anthropic technology, for example. Meanwhile, competitors such as Meta are using Apple’s problems to poach its employees – with extremely deep pockets. Apple, on the other hand, is said to have only marginally adjusted salaries (or share packages) upwards so far.

Personnel managers: “hunting season” at Apple

According to the FT report, Meta was not the only company to attract Apple Intelligence employees. Other AI companies such as xAI (Grok), the Canadian LLM specialist Cohere and even ChatGPT parent company OpenAI have also been successful. The campaign has been running since at least the beginning of the year. Among the as yet unknown departures are said to have been basic model researchers Brandon McKinzie and Dian Ang Yap, who now work at OpenAI. Liutong Zhou from Apple’s machine learning team is now at Cohere.

According to observers from the HR sector quoted by the FT, Pang’s departure to Meta in particular was a bad sign. Many companies told themselves that it was now hunting season at Apple. Apple boss Tim Cook had emphasized last week at an all-hands meeting of the company that Apple needed a “win” in the AI sector. Otherwise, however, he relied on internal reassurance. According to him, the game is not yet decided, and Apple has never been first with new technologies in the past. The problem: AI experts who are particularly familiar with basic models are hard to find. However, Apple is not the only company losing employees: according to the FT, Microsoft managed to poach 20 AI experts from Google DeepMind last month.

(bsc)