Meta successfully poached Apple's head of AI models, as Mark Zuckerberg continues to poach talent from competitors

Meta, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is poaching talent from competitors based on ' The List, ' a collection of outstanding researchers and engineers in the AI industry. It has been reported that Meta has successfully poached Luomin Pan, head of AI model development at Apple.

Meta Hires Apple Top AI Models Executive - Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-07/apple-loses-its-top-ai-models-executive-to-meta-s-hiring-spree?srnd=phx-technology

Meta reportedly recruits Apple's head of AI models | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/meta-reportedly-recruits-apples-head-of-ai-models/

According to Bloomberg, Luomin Pan, a well-known engineer who led Apple's foundational model team, is leaving the company to join Meta and become a member of the company's new Superintelligence Lab.

Meta's Superintelligence Lab is an AI research lab led by Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang, dedicated to the pursuit of 'superintelligence.' This is part of Meta's $14.8 billion investment in Scale AI, a data labeling service.

Meta plans to build an AI lab led by Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang specializing in the pursuit of 'superintelligence,' and offers hundreds of millions to tens of billions of yen in compensation to lure AI researchers from OpenAI and Google - GIGAZINE

Pan moved to Apple from Alphabet, Google's parent company, in 2021. Pan led Apple's AI model development team and has been developing the foundational models that form the basis of AI functions installed in Apple devices, including Apple Intelligence. It has been revealed that Pan was the chief of Google's AI speech recognition research department while at Alphabet.

Apple has recruited about 40 AI experts from Google to open a secret research lab called 'Vision Lab' in Zurich, Switzerland - GIGAZINE

Apple's AI model, which Pan has led the development of, has not necessarily been a great success. TechCrunch, a technology media outlet, pointed out that 'Apple's AI model is inferior in performance to AI models provided by OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Meta.' It has also been reported that Apple is considering adopting a third-party AI model for the LLM-enabled Siri upgrade scheduled for release in 2026.

Apple may abandon in-house AI development to revamp Siri and adopt OpenAI and Anthropic AI - GIGAZINE

Meta has offered Pan a compensation package worth tens of millions of dollars a year to lure him away, Bloomberg reported, adding that Pan's departure could be the first in a series of talent exodus from Apple's troubled AI division.

Meta has also been poaching researchers and engineers with expertise in developing AI models, including Daniel Gross of Safe Superintelligence , former CEO of GitHub Nat Friedman, Yuanjie Li of OpenAI, and Anton Bakhtin of Anthropic.

Meta's Mark Zuckerberg is planning to poach the best AI engineers and researchers based on 'The List' - GIGAZINE