Meta poaches key AI executive from Apple
A foundation model is a large, general-purpose AI model that is trained to handle a wide range of tasks. Developers often start building a new AI model by using a foundation model instead of building a new AI model for each application from scratch. The Apple executive leaving the company is Ruoming Pang, who joined Apple from Alphabet in 2021. Pang is departing Apple and is heading for Meta to join its superintelligence team. These teams make sure that highly-intelligent AI systems are safe and beneficial to humanity.
The people with knowledge of Pang's move to Meta say that he was offered a contract that will pay him tens of millions of dollars annually. And that wasn't the only new AI hire that Meta picked up today. OpenAI researcher Yuanzhi Li and Anton Bakhtin are also joining Meta. Bakhtin has been working at Anthropic PBC on Claude. The latter is a series of large language models (LLMs) created to be a helpful, honest, and harmless AI assistant. It does this to find a balance between capability and ethical considerations. While at Apple, Pang ran a team of 100 people. This team was responsible for Apple's LLM used for Apple Intelligence and other AI features available on Apple devices. Just last month, Apple announced that it is opening up these models to third-party-developers which should result in a number of new apps for iPhone and iPad users. Pang's team at Apple has had to deal with friction from some executives at Apple who want to use third-party models from OpenAI or Anthropic to power an improved version of Siri.
It appears that a new version of Siri, something that Apple desperately needs, will use models developed by either the AFM team that Pang worked with, or third-party models. More members of Apple's AFM team are expected to leave Apple, especially with Meta paying engineers a lot more than Apple pays its engineers doing the same work. The AFM team at Apple will now be run by Zhifeng Chen. Craig Federighi, Apple's head of software engineering, and Mike Rockwell, who now leads engineering for Siri, are currently the ones planning Apple's AI strategy.
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