Accordingly, Ruoming Pang - outstanding engineer and manager in charge of Apple's platform group - will leave the company to join Meta Platforms, marking another failure for the " Tao family" when AI efforts are struggling.
Having joined Apple from Alphabet (parent company Google) in 2021, Ruoming Pang is the latest name to be recruited into Meta Platforms' new super-intellectual team. It is known that to lure Ruoming Pang, Meta Platforms has offered a reward package worth tens of millions of USD per year, significantly higher than what Apple pays to engineers doing similar work.
At Apple, Ruoming Pang leads a team of about 100 people responsible for the company's major language models - the platform for Apple Intelligence and other AI features on the company's devices. In June 2025, the "king of technology" announced that it would open these models to third-party developers for the first time, helping to create a series of new iPhone and iPad apps.
However, within Apple, the platform model team (also known as AFM) is being closely monitored by new leaders as they consider using a third-party model, such as from OpenAI or Anthropic, to support the new version of Siri. These internal discussions have affected the spirit of the AFM team in recent weeks.
Although considering switching to an external solution to operate AI for the new Siri, Apple is still developing a new Siri version based on the model built by Ruoming Pang's team. These AI models used to support Apple Intelligence features running on iPhone, iPad, Mac such as email and article summaries, Genmoji, priority notifications, etc.
Ruoming Pang's move to Meta Platforms is the biggest loss in Apple's AI landslide since the company began developing Apple Intelligence a few years ago, showing the increasingly fierce level of competition for talent in this developing field.
Last month, Meta Platforms also successfully recruited a number of veteran AI researchers from rivals OpenAI, Google and Anthropic to the Superintelligence Labs division led by Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman. This is an effort to comprehensively reorganize AI initiatives of the parent company Facebook and build "individual super intelligence for everyone" - AI technology can perform tasks as good as or beyond humans.
