Zuckerberg Hires Two Senior Apple AI Engineers After Securing Team Leader

• Meta hires Apple AI researchers Mark Lee and Tom Gunter to join its Superintelligence Labs team.
• These appointments follow the earlier recruitment of their former supervisor, Ruoming Pang, underlines Zuckerberg's talent strategy.

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms has hired two senior artificial intelligence (AI) researchers from Apple, marking another significant coup in the increasingly competitive market for top-tier AI talent. The appointments come shortly after Meta announced the high-profile acquisition of Ruoming Pang, the former head of Apple's large language model (LLM) division.

Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, both previously pivotal figures in Apple's AI efforts, have joined Meta's Superintelligence Labs team, according to people familiar with the situation. While Lee has already started in his new role, Gunter is expected to join soon. Meta has not confirmed the hires.

The move demonstrates Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's determination to put the company at the forefront of AI development. Zuckerberg has made AI a top strategic priority, promising massive investments in personnel and infrastructure to match OpenAI and Google's capabilities. Just this week, he announced on Threads that Meta would "invest hundreds of billions of dollars in compute to build superintelligence."

Gunter, a former distinguished engineer at Apple, left the company last month and briefly joined another AI venture before switching to Meta. Lee, reportedly Pang's first hire at Apple, also left recently. Both were regarded as valuable members of Apple's Foundation Models (AFM) team, which is in charge of the company's generative AI projects.

Meta's offer to Pang, which included a compensation package worth over $200 million, appears to have established a precedent. Gunter and several others in Meta's AI division are believed to have secured similarly lucrative multiyear contracts worth more than $100 million.

Also Read: Michael Dell Warns Meta’s AI Hires may Overwhelm Zuckerberg

These aggressive recruitment strategies come as Apple deals with increasing internal uncertainty. Its AFM division, which develops proprietary AI models for Siri and Apple Intelligence, is in flux, with senior executives reportedly considering using third-party models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude for upcoming products.

Apple's top AI executives, including Research Head Daphne Luong and SVP John Giannandrea, are now working with software chiefs Craig Federighi and Mike Rockwell to determine the strategic direction of Siri and related AI services, with a rollout planned for next spring.

In response to Meta's poaching efforts, Apple has begun offering pay raises to some members of the AFM team, which is thought to be around 100 strong, in an effort to retain key personnel. However, these incentives reportedly fall far short of the exorbitant sums Meta is willing to commit.