Senior AI researchers desert Apple amid ‘a crisis of confidence’

There have been a number of reports of senior AI researchers leaving Apple, and the latest of these indicates the problem may be bigger than previously known.

One AI recruitment company has suggested there is a crisis of confidence within Apple, with tech rivals now considering it open season on poaching the company’s engineers …

We learned a month ago that Apple’s top AI exec, Ruoming Pang, had left the company to join Meta.

Pang joined Apple from Google in 2021, and had been managing the roughly 100-person team behind the models that power Apple Intelligence features like Genmoji, Priority Notifications, and on-device text summarization. His exit marks yet another blow to Apple’s efforts to build competitive AI models in-house.

Bloomberg suggested then that others in his team might follow. That indeed proved to be the case less than a fortnight later.

Just days after hiring Ruoming Pang, who had led Apple’s foundation model efforts, Meta is reuniting him with two former colleagues from Cupertino. Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, both key members of Apple’s Foundation Models (AFM) group, are joining Meta’s Superintelligence Labs team.

The Financial Times today reports that Apple has now lost around a dozen of its AI team, including a number of its top researchers.

Apple has lost around a dozen of its artificial intelligence staff, including top researchers, to rivals as the iPhone maker struggles to stay relevant in Silicon Valley’s ferocious AI talent war […]

OpenAI has poached Brandon McKinzie and Dian Ang Yap, two Apple foundation models research engineers.

AI recruiting firm Razoroo says that the loss of Ruoming Pang was a huge blow and has opened the floodgates to more poaching.

“Ruoming Pang leaving is huge: it sends a signal of a crisis of confidence around what is to come,” said Aaron Sines, director of AI recruiting at Razoroo. “A lot of the companies we have as clients are saying ‘hey, look at Apple: it’s open season’.”

The WSJ reports that key AI players are all making net gains in their engineers and researchers.

9to5Mac’s Take

The greatest danger for Apple is that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If top AI staff leave because they believe the Cupertino company is too far behind the curve, then Apple loses the very talent it needs to catch up with leaders in the field.

The crisis of confidence described in the report is likely the reason CEO Tim Cook held a company-wide meeting in an attempt to reassure staff.

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