(Bloomberg) — Meta Platforms Inc. hired a pair of key artificial intelligence researchers who worked at Apple Inc., shortly after poaching their former boss from the iPhone maker.
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The social networking giant hired Mark Lee and Tom Gunter for its Superintelligence Labs team, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Lee has started at Meta after leaving Apple in recent days, while Gunter will begin work in the near future, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the hires haven’t been announced.
The moves are part of a scramble for AI talent across the tech industry. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has been especially aggressive in its recruiting. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has made artificial intelligence the company’s top priority, spending heavily on workers and data centers to try and keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Google.
Gunter left Apple last month, Bloomberg News reported at the time, and both he and Lee worked closely with Ruoming Pang, the chief of Apple’s large language models team who Meta poached earlier this month. To secure Pang, Meta offered a multiyear compensation package worth well over $200 million, Bloomberg reported.
Lee was known as Pang’s first hire at Apple, while Gunter, who was a distinguished engineer at Apple, was regarded as one of the group’s most senior employees. Gunter started at a different AI company after leaving Apple and departed in recent days.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment, while Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The latest hires reflect the continuing turmoil at the Apple Foundation Models team, or AFM, which develops the technology underpinning generative AI. The company’s top AI executives have been considering using outside models to power the Siri voice assistant and other Apple Intelligence features, clouding the team’s future.
The group reports to research head Daphne Luong, a top deputy to AI Senior Vice President John Giannandrea. They’re evaluating strategy changes alongside Mike Rockwell and Craig Federighi, the software executives now in charge of Siri. The idea would be to rely on OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic PBC’s Claude as the foundation for Apple Intelligence beginning next year.
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