Meta, the parent company of Facebook, which is aggressively attracting AI brains, recently recruited two more key talents from Apple with an extraordinary compensation package.
According to Bloomberg News on the 21st, AI researchers Tom Gunter and Mark Li, both of whom are from Apple, recently joined Meta's "Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)." Li has already started working at Meta, and Gunter, who left Apple last month, is expected to join MSL soon.
Gunter has taken on a key role in the AFM team alongside Meta executive Ruming Fang, who oversaw the Apple Foundation Model (AFM) team. Fang also previously moved to MSL.
Fang is reported to have accepted a compensation package offer exceeding $200 million (approximately 280 billion won) to move to Meta. Li is said to be the first person hired by Fang at Apple.
Gunter, who moved to Meta this time, was referred to as a "distinguished engineer" at Apple. Foreign media analyzed that Gunter and Li maintained a close relationship with Fang even after leaving the company, suggesting they have once again grouped together around Fang.
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg is on a mission to recruit talent to position Meta as a leader in the AI market. CEO Zuckerberg personally created a list of the industry's top "AI brains" and is contacting candidates he wants to recruit, proposing high salaries and bonuses to persuade them to join Meta. It is reported that some researchers have been offered compensation packages of up to $300 million (approximately 420 billion won) over four years. In a recent interview, he said, "I will do anything to recruit talent."
Meta is also continuing to lure key talents from OpenAI, which triggered the AI boom in 2022 with ChatGPT.
Recently, Dr. Jung Hyung-won, who has a doctorate from MIT and was involved in the development of the ChatGPT reasoning-specialized multimodal model "o1," moved to Meta along with his colleague Jason Wei. So far, more than ten researchers from OpenAI have transitioned to Meta. It is reported that they were offered compensation exceeding $10 million annually.
Zuckerberg previously invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, which possesses 'data labeling' technology, securing a 49% equity stake, and appointed Alexander Wang (former CEO of Scale AI) as the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO) of Meta and leader of MSL. Naterra Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, was also recruited to oversee AI products and application research.
Meta is scouting entire teams to absorb the 'tribal knowledge' held by top researchers centered around Wang, who is known as the 'network king in the AI industry.'
Zuckerberg recently said on Threads, "We will invest hundreds of billions of dollars in computing to build superintelligence," and that he is focusing on assembling the best and most elite team of talents in the industry.
In contrast, Apple faced a crisis as its internal strategy was thrown into disarray with the replacement of the head of AI voice assistant Siri. Reports of considering the introduction of external AI models for Siri have led to a succession of departures among key researchers, including Fang.