Meta Poaches Apple's Top AI Engineer Pang Ruoming With $256m Pay Package

Meta Platforms has made unusually high compensation offers to new members of its "superintelligence" team - including a more than US$200 million (S$256 million) package for a former Apple distinguished engineer.

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SAN FRANCISCO -

Meta hired Mr Pang Ruoming, who ran Apple's artificial intelligence (AI) models team, with a pay package in the hundreds of millions over a several-year period, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Apple did not try to match the offer, as it far exceeds pay at the company for leaders other than chief executive Tim Cook.

That pay package is in line with other major hires for Meta's new superintelligence team focused on building AI systems that can complete tasks as well as or better than humans, the people said.

The team now includes former GitHub chief Nat Friedman and AI start-up founder Daniel Gross. Meta tapped Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang as its chief AI officer by taking a 49 per cent stake in his firm worth US$14.3 billion.