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The Apple Intelligence team is continuing to endure a brain drain following a fourth researcher’s move over to Meta.
Reports across the summer have indicated that Apple has at least some trouble holding onto its AI researchers. The latest incident has Meta pulling a fourth engineer from the Apple Intelligence team over the course of a month.
Bowen Zhang departed Apple on Friday for Meta, according to unnamed sources in a new Bloomberg report. Zhang joins Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), a group working on producing an AI that can surpass human intelligence.
While at Apple, Zhang was part of the Apple foundational models group, which worked on the core technology of Apple’s AI work.
Zhang, the fourth Apple AI researcher to be poached by Meta in quick succession, follows after a number of other high-profile AI departures from Apple. All of which all occurred over just a month.
The list includes Tom Gunter, a senior large language model researcher who was initially reported as out of Apple on June 30. He was later confirmed on the MSL team on July 17.
Then there was the July 7 report about Ruoming Pang, the head of the foundational models team. That was a hiring that will reportedly cost Meta $200 million.
The third in the month was Mark Lee, another AFM member.
Inevitable departures
The quick construction of a team within Meta using four researchers taken from Apple at great cost is a problem. It’s not a major crisis, though.
Apple, and practically all other tech companies with a hand in AI, are having to deal with rival firms trying to draw away their employees. As Meta has demonstrated, this can be an extremely costly exercise in some cases.
Apple is clearly understanding the issues with retention, as the report says that it has been “marginally increasing” the pay of AFM employees. However, those increases are apparently nowhere near as much as rival companies are prepared to pay out.
The AFM team itself is based around a few dozen individuals, built up within a few years. But, while the loss of four to Meta within a month seems like a lot, Apple is almost certainly trying to fill those openings with other researchers.
There’s certainly a drain of institutional knowledge at play here, but it’s an issue that Apple can avoid by hiring more workers. It hasn’t quite reached the Meta level of drawing employees with massive compensation packets, but it certainly has the resources available if it decides to go down that road.
