Meta poached Apple’s top AI engineer Pang Ruoming with pay package over $256 million

San Francisco – Meta Platforms has made unusually high compensation offers to new members of its “superintelligence” team – including a more than US$200 million (S$256 million) package for a former Apple distinguished engineer.

Meta hired

Mr Pang Ruoming, who ran Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) models team

, with a pay package in the hundreds of millions over a several-year period, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Apple did not try to match the offer, as it far exceeds pay at the company for leaders other than chief executive Tim Cook. 

That pay package is in line with other major hires for Meta’s new superintelligence team focused on building AI systems that can complete tasks as well as or better than humans, the people said.

The team now includes former GitHub chief Nat Friedman and AI start-up founder Daniel Gross. Meta tapped Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang as its chief AI officer by taking a 49 per cent stake in his firm worth US$14.3 billion. 

Meta declined to comment. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

From a pure numbers standpoint, the superintelligence group has some of the highest compensation of any corporate job, including CEO roles at the world’s major banks. But much of the money is tied up in performance targets and unlocked during years of loyalty, meaning it might not all be received if employees leave early or if the stock does not perform well.

The compensation packages for hires to Meta superintelligence labs comprise a base salary, a signing bonus and Meta shares, with the stock as the weightiest part of the package. The salary and bonus to join are often significant cash payments. In cases where a recruit would have to walk away from significant start-up equity to join Meta, the signing bonus may be higher to account for that lost opportunity, the people said.

For the stock portion, Meta tends to put in its contracts that the payouts are tied to specific metrics such as Meta’s stock growing by at least a certain percentage in a given year, the people said. In many cases, the new hires are agreeing to join on contracts that exceed a typical four-year vesting schedule for stock, they added.

New details of the structure of the compensation package come after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shocked Silicon Valley by describing AI talent wars with Meta on a podcast with his brother. Mr Altman said in June that Meta had offered his employees signing bonuses as high as US$100 million, along with even larger overall compensation packages, to join the company’s superintelligence team. Mr Altman suggested his employees were choosing to stay at OpenAI because it had cultivated a better culture and reputation for innovation.

Despite Mr Altman’s remarks, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has now successfully hired more than 10 OpenAI researchers, as well as top researchers and engineers from Anthropic, Google and other start-ups. BLOOMBERG