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After luring one of Apple’s chief AI researchers with a blockbuster pay package, Meta has now hired two more key members of his former team.
One week ago, we learned that Meta poached Apple Foundation Models (AFM) head, Ruoming Pang, paying out a $200 million sign-on bonus. Now, it seems as though the tech giant has come back around for seconds.
According to Bloomberg, Meta has also acquired two of AFM’s key members, Mark Lee and Tom Gunter. The pair will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL) team.
Lee was known for being Pang’s first hire at Apple. Gunter was a distinguished engineer at Apple with an eight year tenure; he departed the company in late June.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has openly said he’d be willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI data centers. It makes sense that he’d want to staff MSL with the best talent money could buy.
Apple isn’t the only company Meta has recruited from. The company has been on an aggressive hiring spree, aiming to pull in top AI talent from across the industry.
That includes OpenAI. CEO Sam Altman says Meta approached members of his team with signing bonuses reportedly reaching as high as $100 million.
Others on the MSL team include former GitHub head Nat Friedman, Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang, and AI startup founder Daniel Gross.
