New Delhi: Meta has pulled off another big AI hire by quietly bringing on two top artificial intelligence engineers from Apple. The move follows Meta’s recent poaching of Ruoming Pang, Apple’s former large language models lead, with a reported compensation package that crossed ₹1,740 crore ($200 million).
According to a Bloomberg report, Apple veterans Mark Lee and Tom Gunter have now also joined Meta’s Superintelligence Labs team. Lee has already started working with the company, while Gunter is expected to join soon. Both had previously worked under Pang at Apple, and Gunter was described as one of the most senior engineers on Apple’s AI team.
Meta’s growing appetite for Apple’s AI brains
Meta’s recruitment spree comes at a time when Apple’s internal AI division, known as the Apple Foundation Models team (AFM), is reportedly facing internal changes and growing uncertainty.
Lee was Pang’s first hire at Apple, and Gunter was a “distinguished engineer” deeply involved in building Apple’s generative AI systems. After Pang’s exit, Meta wasted no time in targeting his former team. The new hires are said to be joining Meta’s Superintelligence division, which is focused on building next-gen AI that can outsmart humans in many tasks.
According to Bloomberg, Meta has been luring top talent by offering multiyear compensation deals that are many times more generous than what Apple currently pays. In Gunter’s case, insiders said the deal is valued at over $100 million, which is more than ₹870 crore.
What’s going on inside Apple’s AI team?
Apple’s AI division, which includes about 100 engineers, is now under pressure. Leadership changes and strategic shifts have sparked internal uncertainty. There’s talk that Apple may not rely entirely on its own AI models for Siri and other products. Instead, it could use third-party models like ChatGPT from OpenAI or Claude from Anthropic.
Right now, the company is working on parallel versions of the upcoming Siri upgrade, one using Apple’s in-house models, and the other powered by outside tech. A final decision is expected before launch in early 2026.
To prevent further exits, Apple has started offering raises to some of its AI engineers. But those raises are not close to what Meta is offering.
Zuckerberg wants the “most elite” AI team
Mark Zuckerberg has made his ambitions very clear. Earlier this week, he posted on Threads that Meta would “invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence.”
He added, “I’m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry.”
Many of Meta’s newest AI recruits now work just a few desks away from Zuckerberg at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters in California, the report said.
Meta’s aggressive hiring spree is a reminder of how intense the AI race has become across Silicon Valley. While Apple is still figuring out its next move with Siri and generative AI, Meta seems to be moving fast, snapping up the people who once built Apple’s own models.