Apple loses fourth AI researcher in a month to Meta’s superintelligence team
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In response to the job offers from Meta and others, Apple has been marginally increasing the pay of some staff.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
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SAN FRANCISCO – Apple has lost its fourth artificial intelligence (AI) researcher in a month to Meta Platforms, marking the latest setback to the iPhone maker’s AI efforts.
Mr Zhang Bowen, a key multimodal AI researcher at Apple, left the company on July 25 and is set to join Meta’s recently formed superintelligence team, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr Zhang was part of the Apple foundation models group, or AFM, which built the core technology behind the company’s AI platform.
Meta previously lured away the leader of the team, Mr Pang Ruoming,
In response to the job offers from Meta and others, Apple has been marginally increasing the pay of its AFM staff, whether or not they have threatened to leave, said the people. Still, the pay levels pale in comparison with those of rivals.
Apple shares declined as much as 1.5 per cent to US$210.82, reaching a session low in New York trading. The stock was already down 15 per cent in 2025 to July 28’s close.
The departures have thrown Apple’s models team into flux. Mr Pang played a central role in defining the department’s road map and research direction, and multiple people within AFM now say its future is unclear. Additional engineers are actively interviewing for jobs elsewhere, according to the people. Another team member – Mr Floris Weers – left for a start-up in recent weeks.
The AFM team is critical to Apple’s broader AI strategy. The group’s work underpins the Apple Intelligence platform, which launched in 2024. But now the company is considering a shift towards using more third-party models.
Some Apple executives see the firm’s home-grown models as a stumbling block to catching up with AI rivals, the people said. And the uncertainty over whether to outsource the technology has hurt morale at the company and helped fuel the attrition.
In recent months, Apple started considering a move away from AFM models for a new version of its Siri voice assistant. The work includes powering Siri with OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic PBC’s Claude models.
The company is simultaneously working on a competing version based on new AFM models. While a final decision has not been made, Apple’s exploration of outside options has triggered unease within AFM.
Internally, executives have sought to reassure the team members, saying their work remains important to Apple’s AI strategy. They have told engineers that the company is committed to in-house model development, part of a broader desire to own critical underlying technologies, as the company has done with chips in recent years.
But Apple’s own policies have made it harder for its AI team to keep up with competitors. The company has a longstanding commitment to privacy and generally favours handling AI tasks on devices – rather than in the cloud – so the data does not have to be precessed somewhere out of the users’ control. That approach limits AI capabilities because phones are not as powerful as data centres.
Apple Intelligence mostly relies on an on-device model with three billion parameters, a measure of complexity and learning capacity. Competitors, in contrast, offer cloud-based systems with a trillion-plus parameters. Apple does have its own cloud model, but that is in the range of 150 billion parameters.
The AFM group is now overseen by Mr Chen Zhifeng and reports to Ms Daphne Luong, head of AI research at Apple. She answers to Mr John Giannandrea, senior vice-president of AI. BLOOMBERG
