Meta has announced an end to recruit, but Facebook's parent company still shows special interest in Apple's personnel. Accordingly, Jian Zhang - Head of Apple's AI research team on robots has recently decided to join Meta Robotics Studio. It can be seen that Zhang's departure continues to fuel concerns about the gray bleeding of Apple's AI team.
Meta has previously successfully recruited Frank Chu, Apple's head of AI, cloud infrastructure, training, and search. Now, the list of personnel leaving Apple continues to grow as Jian Zhang officially joins Meta.
Jian Zhang is a key robotics researcher at Apple, who led a small group of scholars focused on automation technology and AI application in products. The group experienced turmoil when Mario Srouji, a member under Zhang, left Apple in April 2025 to run the AI division at Archer Aviation Inc.
Jian Zhang's departure comes at the same time that Apple lost three more key engineers in the Foundation Models group, including: John Peebles and Nan Du, who have moved to OpenAI, Zhao Meng joining Anthropic.
In addition, in just the past few weeks, Apple's Foundation Models group has lost about 10 members, including the leader. This is a core force in building the Apple Intelligence platform, a platform announced last year to help Apple catch up with the AI race.
In addition, Apple is also considering large acquisitions with names such as: Mistral or Perplexity. At the same time, they are looking to cooperate with OpenAI, Anthropic and even Google to develop the AI models needed for the new Siri version. This is a voice assistant introduced by Apple at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024 but has not yet been released to the market.
