Meta Continues AI Focus by Adding 2 Ex-Apple Researchers

Meta reportedly continued its artificial intelligence (AI)-focused hiring spree by adding two AI researchers who had worked for Apple.

The company hired Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, who will join its new Superintelligence Labs team, Bloomberg reported Thursday (July 17), citing unnamed sources.

Lee has started at Meta, while Gunter will do so shortly, according to the report. Gunter left Apple last month, joined another AI company and will now move to Meta.

Both worked closely with Ruoming Pang, who led Apple’s large language models team before moving to Meta earlier this month, per the report.

Neither Apple nor Meta immediately replied to PYMNTS request for comment.

It was reported July 7 that Pang was joining Meta after being offered a package worth tens of millions of dollars per year and that Pang’s departure marked another setback for Apple’s AI project and the latest high-profile hire for Meta’s Superintelligence group.

Meta has been pursuing its AI-focused hiring spree since at least early June, when it was reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was taking a hands-on approach to expanding the company’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) team and was recruiting from a pool of AI researchers and engineers who met with him at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto.

It was reported at the time that Zuckerberg was frustrated with Meta’s limitations in AI and aimed to hire around 50 people to help turn the company into a leader in the field of AGI.

On June 30, it was reported that Zuckerberg told Meta staff that he was creating the Superintelligence Labs business unit and that it would be led by some of the company’s most recent hires.

“I’ve spent the past few months meeting top folks across Meta, other AI labs, and promising startups to put together the founding group for this small talent-dense effort,” Zuckerberg reportedly said in an internal memo. “We’re still forming this group and we’ll ask several people across the AI org to join this lab as well.”

Meta is investing in AI infrastructure as well. On Monday (July 14), Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Threads that the company will invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” into that infrastructure.

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