Apple has lost its fourth artificial intelligence researcher in a month, who has joined Meta Platforms Inc. This is the latest setback for the iPhone maker’s artificial intelligence efforts.
According to informed sources, Bowen Zhang, a key researcher in multimodal artificial intelligence at Apple, left the company on Friday and will join Meta’s newly established Super Intelligence team. Zhang was a member of Apple’s Foundation Model Group (AFM), which built the core technology behind Apple’s artificial intelligence platform.
According to Bloomberg, Meta previously poached the team’s leader, Ruoming Pang, with a salary of over $200 million. Two other researchers from the team, Tom Gunter and Mark Lee, have also recently joined Meta. AFM consists of dozens of engineers and researchers spread across Cupertino, California, and New York.
People familiar with the matter said that in response to job offers from Meta and other companies, Apple has been slightly increasing the salaries of its AFM employees, regardless of whether these employees have threatened to leave. Because these measures are confidential, the people familiar with the matter requested anonymity. However, compared with their rivals, their salary levels still fall short.
Spokespeople for Apple and Meta declined to comment.
Apple’s share price once dropped by 1.5% to $210.82, hitting a new intraday low on the New York Stock Exchange. As of Monday’s close, the stock has fallen by 15% so far this year.
The departures of these engineers have thrown Apple’s model team into turmoil. Pang played a core role in formulating the department’s development roadmap and research direction, and several insiders at AFM currently say the department’s future is unclear. According to informed sources, other engineers are actively interviewing for other positions. Another team member, Floris Weers, left the team in recent weeks to join a startup.
The AFM team is crucial to Apple’s broader AI strategy. The team’s work laid the foundation for the Apple Intelligence platform launched last year. But now, the company is considering shifting to using more third-party models.
Insiders said that some Apple executives believe that the company’s self-developed model is a stumbling block in catching up with its artificial intelligence rivals. The uncertainty over whether to outsource the technology has dampened morale and exacerbated staff turnover.
Meanwhile, Meta is actively expanding its workforce. The parent company of Facebook has offered huge salaries to AI talents across Silicon Valley, poaching many from Apple, OpenAI and Anthropic.
In recent months, Apple has begun considering dropping the AFM model in the new version of Siri. This work involves using models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic PBC’s Claude to support Siri.
The company is also developing a competing version based on the new AFM model. Although a final decision has not yet been made, Apple’s exploration of external options has caused unease within AFM.
Inside Apple, executives have been trying to reassure team members that their work remains crucial to the company’s artificial intelligence strategy. They have told engineers that the company is committed to developing internal models, which is part of a broader desire to own key underlying technologies, much as it has done in chips in recent years.
However, Apple’s own policies make it more difficult for its AI team to keep up with its rivals. The company has long been committed to protecting privacy and usually prefers to handle AI tasks on devices rather than in the cloud, so that data does not have to be processed in places beyond users’ control. This approach limits the capabilities of AI, as mobile phones are not as powerful as data centers.
Apple Intelligence mainly relies on a device model with 3 billion parameters, which demonstrates its complexity and learning ability. In contrast, the cloud systems provided by competitors have over a trillion parameters. Apple does have its own cloud model, but the number of parameters is around 150 billion.
The AFM team is currently led by Chen Zhifeng and reports to Daphne Luong, the head of Apple’s AI research. She reports to John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of AI.
